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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Reading Now

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

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

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

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

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

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

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

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

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

Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-à-vis seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.

Full details for ENGL 2035 - Science Fiction

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 2160 - Television

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.

Full details for ENGL 2620 - Introduction to Asian 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, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, 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 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

An historical study of children's literature from the 17th century to the present, principally in Europe and America, which will explore changing literary forms in relation to the social history of childhood. Ranging from oral folktale to contemporary novelistic realism (with some glances at film narrative), major figures may include Perrault, Newbery, the Grimms, Andersen, Carroll, Alcott, Stevenson, Burnett, Kipling, the Disney studio, E. B. White, C. S. Lewis, Sendak, Silverstein, Mildred Taylor, and Bette Greene. We'll also encounter a variety of critical models—psychoanalytic, materialist, feminist, structuralist—that scholars have employed to explain the variety and importance of children's literature. Finally, we will consider how the idea of "the child" has evolved over this period.

Full details for ENGL 2730 - Children's 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

If you love animals but are sad because you can't keep them in your dorm room, poems may well be the perfect substitute. Evoking the bodies and spirits of non-human creatures has always been one of the special domains of poetry. In this course, we'll consider a wide range of poems that take many different approaches to unlocking the mysterious otherness of animals, using all the tricks and techniques of this venerable art: rhythm, form, metaphor, observation and imagination. In discussions and essays we'll explore the ways in which poems about animals raise major questions of ethics and epistemology, while achieving the primal magic of translating life into language. Poets to be studied include Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Lawrence, Moore, Bishop, Hughes, and many others.

Full details for ENGL 2755 - Birds, Beasts, and Bards: The Poetry of Animals

POW! ZAP! DOOM! This is a class about how we can draw together, studying a medium that is based in the practice, in all senses, of "drawing together." We will read Pulitzer winning memoirs and NSFW gutter rubbish. We will trace the history of sequential art from about 1898 to the present, including caricature, pop art, and meme cultures, Wonder Woman and Wimmin's Comix, Archie and archives. Studying comics requires us to entangle disciplines and to make things: graphic design, marketing, media studies, law, education, and various illuminated cosmologies. What is this medium that teaches us to read the page anew, to speak in bubbles, to witness and play with apocalypse, to enjoy our suspension in the infinite, and to indulge in graphic sensations?

Full details for ENGL 2785 - Comic Books and Graphic Novels

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

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for ENGL 2950 - Introduction to Humanities

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

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. 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.

Full details for ENGL 3021 - Literary Theory on the Edge

An introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and the Icelandic family saga-the "native" heroic literary genre of Icelandic tradition. Texts will vary but will normally include the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, Hrafnkels Saga, Njals Saga, Laxdaela Saga, and Grettirs Saga. All readings will be in translation. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3080 - Icelandic Family Sagas

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

The course focuses on Shakespeare's middle to late plays, from the "problem comedies," through the great tragedies and romances.  While we will pay particular attention to questions of dramatic form (genre) and historical context (including ways in which the plays themselves call context into question), the primary concentration will be on careful close readings of the language of the play-texts, in relation to critical questions of subjectivity, power, and art. On the way, we will encounter problems of sexuality, identity, emotion, the body, family, violence, politics, God, the nation, nature and money (not necessarily in that order). The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3270 - Shakespeare: The Late Plays

In Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda marks the victory of the American Revolution with a ballad originally sung in Britain and associated with parliament's beheading of the king in 1649. In this course, we will examine the literary representation of revolution as both a liberatory and ghastly "overturning" of hierarchical order from the Puritan revolution to British responses to the American and French revolutions. Reading poetry, drama, fiction, and political essays, we will especially focus on the way sexual and familial tyranny and terror in sentimental and Gothic literature figure socio-political violence in upside-down worlds. We will also discuss revolutions in literature and their overturning and remaking of genres and forms. Authors include Milton, Behn, Defoe, Burke, Paine, Brockden Brown, Wollstonecraft and Godwin. This course may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Full details for ENGL 3320 - The World Turned Upside Down: Literature and Revolution

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

Full details for ENGL 3370 - Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen

This course will look at how literature based at sea helps both shape and challenge concepts of freedom and capital. By looking at the relationship between the sea-faring economy and its relationship to American Expansion and the history of enslavement we will explore how literature based at sea provided both a reflection and an alternate reality to land-based politics. While the main focus of the course will be nineteenth-century literature, we will also be exploring maritime literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its analogues in speculative fiction.

Full details for ENGL 3440 - Merchants, Whalers, Pirates, Sailors: American Maritime Literature from the 19th Century and Beyond

"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.

Full details for ENGL 3550 - Decadence

How can we account for the contemporary popularity of podcasts? In what ways do they build on, and break from, earlier forms of writing for the ear? In this class we will study innovative podcast fictions like Welcome to Night Vale, Forest 404, and Homecoming together with pathbreaking aural works of the 20th century, from The War of the Worlds to John Cage's Roaratorio and albums by the Firesign Theatre. We will consider the new opportunities and challenges of the podcasting medium, making our own recordings along the way. And we will look at well-known authors — from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas to Ursula Le Guin and Amiri Baraka — who experimented with then-new technologies like the gramophone, radio, audiotape, LP, headphones, the Walkman, and more. 

Full details for ENGL 3615 - Podcast, Radio, Gramophone: Literary Technologies of Sound

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

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

The course asks you to think about the role of fiction in producing a sense of history, politics, and culture in the nineteenth-century United States. In particular, we will think about the relations among stylistic concerns in fiction and the construction of identities formed by national, racial, gendered, and sexual allegiances. Authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, and Fanny Fern.

Full details for ENGL 3660 - Reading the Nineteenth-Century American Novel

This course focuses on works that exemplify environmental consciousness—a sense that humans are not the center of the world and that to think they are may have catastrophic consequences for humans themselves. Environmental literature is not just a major strand of American literature but one of its most distinctive contributions to the literature of the world. We will be reading works mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, both poetry and fiction, confronting the challenges of thinking and writing with an ecological consciousness in the 21st. Cornell being a rich environment in which to pursue such investigations, creative projects will be encouraged. Inspiration is assured.

Full details for ENGL 3675 - The Environmental Imagination in American Literature

After the violent events in Charlottesville in 2017, and especially the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, most people have become aware of the extreme form of white political identities that are now a visible presence in our society. What can we learn about the history of "whiteness" from literature and popular culture?  What alternative conception of whiteness, including a consciously anti-racist white identity, can we glean from novels and plays, movies and TV shows?  This introductory course uses works by prominent writers (James Baldwin, Toni Morrison) as well as movies (including Get Out and Blindspotting) plus TV shows (Mad Men, Sopranos) to explore these questions.

Full details for ENGL 3734 - Whiteness in Literature and Popular Culture

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 and political figures such as Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.

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

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

Full details for ENGL 3762 - Law and Literature

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

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

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

This semester-long elective course is designed for the undergraduate students who may have little or no familiarity with South- Asian literature or cinema but are interested in knowing it's diverse cultures, social structures, and politics. This course covers the major literary movements in the literary landscape of the region such as the Progressive Writer's movement and regional modernisms. It also explores the impact of British colonialism on the culture and the politics of South-Asia. The course encourages thinking across boundaries of literatures, cultures, and histories. This course covers a range of topics and diverse genres: from Ghazal, a prominent poetic expression, to fictional representation of the two partitions (1947 and 1971) and its aftermaths to theatrical retelling of the Indian mythology. The course also encourages students to critically engage with South-Asian Cinema. The course looks at the intersectionality of Caste and Class and Gender in the South-Asian in contemporary South-Asian. Course has literature from  India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka that best represent the region.

Full details for ENGL 3913 - South Asian Poetry and Narrative: From Ghazals to Film

The Beyoncé Nation course at Cornell, which has been requested regularly over the past several years, is finally back by popular demand!  Beyoncé's trajectory from Houston, Texas as a member of the group Destiny's Child to international fame and superstardom and a successful career as a solo singer, actress, clothing designer and entrepreneur holds important implications for critical dialogues on the U.S. South and national femininity. One aspect of this course examines themes related to her intersectional identity as a model of black and Southern womanhood that have recurred in her song lyrics, performances and visual representations, which have also been foundational for her development of more recent productions, including "Formation" and the larger Lemonade album.  In this course, we will examine the related film and its adaptation by black queer and trans women in the Glass Wing Group's Lemonade Served Bitter Sweet. Moreover, we will examine the Homecoming documentary, along with Beyoncé's newer projects such as The Lion: King:  The Gift, Black Is King and Netflix productions.  We will also consider Beyoncé's early career in Destiny's Child, including the impact of projects such "Independent Women, Part I" and popular icons such as Farrah Fawcett in shaping her Southern discourse.  We will carefully trace Beyoncé's journey to global fame and iconicity and the roles of the music business, social media and technology, fashion, and film in her development. We will consider her impact on politics and contemporary activist movements, as well as her engagement of black liberation discourses from the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName and #TakeAKnee. Furthermore, we will consider Beyoncé's impact in shaping feminism, including black feminism, along with her impact on constructions of race, gender, sexuality, marriage, family, and motherhood.  In addition to her body of work in film and video, we will draw on popular essays and critical writings on Beyoncé that have been produced from journals to books, along with visual materials and several biographies.  We will draw on the growing body of critical research and writing in Beyoncé studies, taking up book-length studies such as Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism, and essays from collections such as Adrienne Trier-Bieniek's The Beyonce Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism, Kinitra D. Brooks's The Lemonade Reader:  Beyoncé, Black Feminism and Spirituality, Veronica Chambers's Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, and Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee's Beyoncé in the World:  Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times.  Additionally, we will draw on works such as Michael Eric Dyson's JAY-Z:  Made in America, and Destiny's Child:  The Untold Story by Mathew Knowles, who will visit to discuss his books and backgrounds related to the music business and entrepreneurship.

Full details for ENGL 3950 - Beyoncé Nation: The Remix

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

Full details for ENGL 4260 - The Animal

"I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age," Oscar Wilde once announced in a characteristically immodest, yet accurate, appraisal of his talent. With his legendary wit, his exuberant style of perversity and paradox, and his tendency to scandal, he has come to stand in symbolic relation to our own age as well, and for some of the same reasons he was a delight and a challenge to the Victorians. We will explore his poetry, essays, plays, letters, and fiction, in the context of the Aesthetic, Decadent, and Symbolist movements of the late-nineteenth century and also in the context of current debates in literary criticism and the history of sexuality.

Full details for ENGL 4405 - Oscar Wilde

This is an indispensable, probing, and pleasurable course for those studying nineteenth, twentieth, and contemporary century Anglophone and European literature. Readings will include works by Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Ferrante, Pamuk, Kundera, and W. G. Sebald. The emphasis will be on close reading of individual texts, but we shall place the authors and works within the context of literary, political, cultural, and intellectual history. We shall also be aware of critical and theoretical approaches. The course will seek to define the development of literary modernism and as well as Post-Modernism. We shall be especially interested in the relationship between modern literature and modern painting and sculpture.

Full details for ENGL 4535 - The Modern Imagination: The Major Authors

This course takes up literatures and arts of Black speculation in the broadest terms, from science fiction and fantasy to Afrofuturism and Afropunk to Phillis Wheatley's and Outkast's poetics. We'll give special attention to speculation in African American literature to think through how Black people used art in the midst of anti-blackness to imagine worlds otherwise and for the pleasure of the craft. We'll read Black speculation through multiple forms, including novels, graphic novels, film, and music. Figures for consideration include William J. Wilson ("Ethiop"), Pauline Hopkins, Frances E. W. Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler, Ryan Coogler, Eve Ewing, N.K. Jemisin, Sun Ra, and Erykah Badu.

Full details for ENGL 4605 - Black Speculative Fiction

H. P. Lovecraft helped to create an American subgenre of horror and speculative fictions. He was also a notorious racist. Writing from New England, he imagined ancient and terrifying landscapes of racial miscegenation and madness that haunt a deeply anti-Black and anti-Indigenous settler colonialism. For Matt Ruff, a graduate of Cornell and author of the novel Lovecraft Country that is the basis for Misha Green's HBO series of the same name, antiblack racial violence provides the deep-seated horror that lurks beneath Lovecraft's stories. Using Lovecraft and the HBO series adaptation as a frame for thinking about the racialized present, we will spend the semester considering how the speculation of settler colonial horrors and fantasies is undone as each of the authors we read reanimate the centrality of race, Blackness, and Indigeneity to just and unjust visions of the past, present, and future.

Full details for ENGL 4615 - Lovecraft Country: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Literary Racial Speculation

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

For nearly a century before the first settlers arrived in the Americas, English writers created fictions of the so-called "New World." We'll begin the course by looking at these fantasies about the "new world." What were their sources? How did these fictions prepare for and attempt to legitimate the colonization of the Americas? To what extent were English writers critical of colonization? Then we will consider America's own fictions: the poetry, narratives, and oral traditions that were produced by or circulated among settlers, indentured and enslaved laborers, and indigenous Americans for the hundred years or so after the first English settlements. Readings include Toni Morrison's A Mercy, More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Tempest, selections from Hakluyt, Donne, Marvell, Milton, Sagoyewatha, Canassetego, Winthrop, Williams, Bradstreet, Occam, and Wheatley.

Full details for ENGL 4708 - Fictions of the New World

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 4913 - August Wilson: the Cycle of Black Life

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 class may be used to toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 4920 - Honors Seminar II

In recent years, scholars in Indigenous studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, and Arab American studies have discussed variant dispossessions that influence their own cultural contexts and implicate the United States and the world at large. This course brings critical concerns in comparative ethnic studies to the field of comparative literature to study the patterns that underlie the former and their insights about national violence, race and racism, and contemporary forms of social control and marginalization. The course's secondary purpose is to craft "relationality," a theory of cultural and geographic relatability, as a comparative methodology that illuminates the similarities and affinities between Indigenous, refugee, and people of color narratives. In class discussions and assignments, students will rehearse a relational analysis as they connect the assigned readings to each other while crafting overarching observations about the dispossessive and exclusionary nature of the nation-state today.

Full details for ENGL 4928 - Literature and Relationality

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 4961 - Race and the University

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

Full details for ENGL 6050 - Archives and Artifacts

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 considers the idea of the vernacular in pre-modern England, early modern Europe, and post-colonial Africa by sampling two long historical trajectories before and after the British empire, converging on Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. One samples medieval and Renaissance writings in English in relation to its institutions up to Bunyan's dissenting work, the other the aesthetic and linguistic journey Bunyan's work later undertook in England and the British colonies in Africa. What happens to "vernacularity" in both spans? What aesthetics emerge from the clash between standardized and 'vulgar' 'Englishes' and African languages? Around Bunyan we will sample medieval chronicles, lyrics, Piers Plowman, Things Fall Apart, and other narratives and poetry from post-colonial Africa to pursue the relationships between language, identity, aesthetics, and power. 

Full details for ENGL 6350 - Precolonial and Postcolonial English Vernacularity

In this class we will closely read six books of contemporary black poetry written in English. We will consider how this poetry negotiates the distance between experience and experiment, lyricism and analysis, song and the leaving of song. We will consider black poetry as a mode of criticism and that consideration will shape not only the reading but also the writing we do in the class. The writing for the class will consist of a chapbook-length poem or group of poems that will constitute a work of criticism (which we will consider is not the same as a critique) focusing on any or all of what we read in the class. No status or history as a practicing poet is required.

Full details for ENGL 6516 - Songs of Experiment: Disruptions of Lyricism in Contemporary Anglophone Black Poetry

This course examines women of color feminist cultural production in North America from the 1970s to the present. We will focus on ways that women of color feminisms arose from and posed serious interventions to both second-wave feminism and nationalist movements through an intersectional analysis of race, class, gender, and sexuality. How do creative forms allow us to address women of color onto-epistemologies, including the modalities of what Cherríe Moraga names "theory of the flesh," and what Barbara Christian conceptualizes as narrative theorizing? We will read original texts from women of color feminist movements alongside contemporary literature to consider women of color feminisms' enduring impact on social change organizing and fields of study, including Black Lives Matter, queer of color critique, and critical disability studies.

Full details for ENGL 6602 - The Culture and Theory of Women of Color Feminisms

This course centers on the English-language fictions created about the so-called "New World" in the period just prior to the first English settlements, and on the discourses that followed in their wake: the poetry, narratives, and oral traditions that were produced by or circulated among settlers, indentured and enslaved laborers, and indigenous Americans for the hundred years or so after the first English settlements. We'll consider how these fictions shaped, legitimated, and sometimes critiqued the political and social realities of colonization and settlement. And we'll also explore creative and archival efforts that have sought to redress the fictions of the "new world." This course will provide students with an introduction to archival research in rare and manuscripts collections.

Full details for ENGL 6708 - Fictions of the New World

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

In what temporal zone does narrative practice meet the senses? Put differently, what is the temporal work done by the senses in a text? This seminar focuses on the temporal effects of narrative representations of the sensorium, the ways that the senses can function in narrative to open up times/spaces of queer potentiality. It investigates how the experience of the sensorium can render its subject out of sync with normative time, enabling that subject to feel the pleasure of such a state rather than merely its terrors. We will also explore the extent to which the senses function to disrupt heteronormative timelines and consequently serve both as a resource for queer survival and a potentially revolutionary practice.

Full details for ENGL 6775 - Queer Time and the Senses

Urban Justice Labs are innovative seminars designed to bring students into direct contact with complex questions about race and social justice within the context of American urban culture, architecture, humanities, and media. Drawing from Cornell's collections, such as the Hip Hop Collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, the Human Sexuality Collection, holdings on American Indian History and Culture, the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, and the Johnson Museum of Art, students will leverage archival materials to launch new observations and explore unanticipated approaches to urban justice. Urban Justice Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. For current special topic descriptions and application instructions, visit our urban seminars website.

Full details for ENGL 6919 - Urban Justice

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 contact the department to request access to an instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for ENGL 7940 - Directed Study

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

Full details for ENGL 7950 - Group Study