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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

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

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

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2350 - Literature and Medicine

This course will introduce students to Black Queer literatures and media. Since these materials decenter whiteness and patriarchal heterosexism, they often seem illegible to those approaching them from the perspective of the dominant culture. We will start with foundational texts that outline the parameters of our dominant culture. We will then discuss Black Queer contemporary novels, films, essays, and visual art in order to understand the ways that these works move past the limitations of those parameters. By engaging these literatures and media, this course investigates the exciting possibilities that emerge from understanding alternative ways of being and living in our world. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2560 - Black Queer Writing and Media

This class will consider the relationship between literature in its emerging new media formats by looking specifically at the shared and divergent narrative strategies that old and new mediums use to construct worlds and tell stories. Over the course of the semester, we will consider the history of material formats, look at how video game play has transformed novels, and consider some of the larger questions emerging from video game studies. What are games and where do they fit within cultural, literary, racial, social, and gender studies? How do technologies and mediums affect access to and experience of story, aesthetics, and design? What are the cultural and social ideas communicated through games and how do the means of their production function within global economies?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2565 - Games Telling Stories

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. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

This course looks at the American Gothic tradition as showing us the fissures in early American political life specifically around the issues of slavery and Native American land rights. While Gothic literature is often relegated to the role of entertainment, it also reveals the ways in which American culture was, as Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, "shaped by the presence of the racial other." The Gothic also offers a space through which to offer not just clever observations but scathing critiques by augmenting the sense of the monstrous underlying grand sentiments of American Exceptionalism.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2635 - A Haunted House Divided: The American Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Literature

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, 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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2703 - Thinking Media

Do we have a duty to make strangers feel at home? Should we give others welcome even when they seem alien and threatening? And how does it feel to be homeless, cast out—refused hospitality? These questions have a long history, from ancient Egypt and the Hebrew Bible to debates about immigration in our own time. The first half of the course, ENGL 2705, which can be taken as a separate 2-credit course, will track this idea from ancient times to the modern period, bringing together literary and religious texts and visual art; the second half, ENGL 2706, also offered as a 2-credit unit, will focus on treatments of hospitality in fiction, film, and other media in our own time, including Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Stephen Frear's film, Dirty Pretty Things.

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

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

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2715 - Memoir

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2890 - Expository Writing

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In addition to the more than two million people imprisoned under the criminal justice system, the U.S. government captures even more people into carceral spaces within and beyond its borders. Looking into a range of texts from Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and Arab American writers, this course examines the U.S. penal system, not only as prisons and physical places, but also in state practices that decide social value, disadvantage people based on race, and criminalize them accordingly. Ultimately, this course asks and answers the following questions: what is the relationship between race and punishment? What are the socially constructed roles of incarceration? And what are some of the narratives and abolitionist, decolonial perspectives that push against them?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2909 - Prison Literature: Race, Carcerality, and Abolition

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3021 - Literary Theory on the Edge

Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the "darker side" of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3120 - Beowulf

This course is designed to explore the relationship between ethics, politics, and aesthetics through careful attention to literary explorations of the complex problem of evil in a range of literary and visual texts including genres from myth through poetry and drama to painting and film. We will read and study excerpts of works from Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, through Shakespeare, Cervantes, María de Zayas, Leibniz, Milton, Hieronymous Bosch, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The recurring questions for us along the way will be about the role of reading and interpretation in relation to the problem of evil and what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the "richness of the real." This class may be used toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3245 - Evil: The Literary Question of the Human

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3390 - Jane Austen

In 1940, with the publication of his novel Native Son, Richard Wright helped to launch the protest era in African American literature. This course focuses on the development of key fiction and nonfiction genres that have shaped the development of African American literature from the mid-20th-century to the contemporary era. Genres that we will consider include poetry, fiction, the essay, the speech, autobiography, and the novel. We will explore the main periods in this literature's development such as the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the black women's literary renaissance of the 1970s, and consider the rise of science fiction writing. Authors who will be considered include Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and August Wilson. We will also incorporate discussion of works in film and art that have been the outgrowth of writing y African American authors. The course will include screenings of scenes from the class film A Raisin in the Sun, along with the films Dutchman and Beloved.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3508 - African American Literature: 1930s - present

Mainstream media would have us believe that driving a new Toyota Prius, recycling, and shopping "clean" at Whole Foods would make us all food environmentalists, right? Additionally, climate change and environmental degradation are often discussed as if they are phenomena that affect us all equally. Despite these dynamics, research in recent years tells us that while there might be some general ways that we experience our constantly changing physical environments—race, gender, and location very much affect how we experience "Nature." In this course we will use literature from across the African diaspora to investigate how looking at race, gender, and location produces very different ideas about environment, environmentalism, and "Nature" itself.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, CA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3565 - Black Ecoliterature

This course studies the life experiences and political struggles of black women who have attained political leadership. It will study their rise to political power through an examination of the autobiographies of women from the Caribbean, the U.S., Africa and Brazil. Political figures such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Shirley Chisholm, Benedita da Silva will serve as some of the primary sources of analysis and discussion. Students will have the opportunity to select and follow a political leader and her challenges closely. The first half of the course will examine some of the general literature on the subject; the second half will study the women in their own words. We will attempt to have some available local political leaders visit the class.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, CA-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3606 - Black Women and Political Leadership

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS, LA-AS)

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

"The pleasure of the text," Roland Barthes writes, "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do." What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas?  In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3702 - Desire and Cinema

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, NGOs, and nonprofits working on human rights, public health, and environmental and land rights in the US and abroad. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, critical design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects with the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Health Access Connect (Uganda), NYS 4-H, and SOOFA Ranch (GA). Consulting on partners' ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO's Human-Centered Design Thinking and Stanford's Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as UX, tactical media, and activist organizing developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, CA-AS, HST-AS)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, LA-AS)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3830 - Narrative Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3850 - Poetry Writing

Writers of creative nonfiction plumb the depths of their experience and comment memorably on the passing scene. They write reflectively on themselves and journalistically on the activities and artifacts of others. The voice they seek is at once uniquely personal, objectively persuasive, and accessible to others who want 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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

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

This course examines the stories, literary examples, and metaphors at work in elaborating capitalist society and its "hero," the modern economic subject: the so-called "homo oeconomicus." We will examine the classic liberal tradition (e.g., Locke, Smith, Mill) alongside its later critiques (e.g., Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Brecht) as well as more recent feminist, Black, and indigenous interventions (e.g., Federici, Davis, "land-grab university" research). Throughout we will create a dialogue between texts, both across centuries (e.g., Locke on Property with Indigenous Dispossession; Balzac's Pere Goriot with Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century) as well as across genres (e.g., Nomadland with Geissler's Seasonal Associate). At stake are the narrative and figurative moments in theoretical texts as well as crucial literary sources (novels, novellas, and plays) as they collectively develop the modern economic paradigms of industry, exchange, credit-debt, and interest – as well as the people they often leave out: women, people of color, the working class. The seminar will include working with an archive, collection, or museum at Cornell.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, CA-AS, ETM-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3916 - Fables of Capitalism

This course will explore the traditional dynamic and norms of political press coverage in the United States, and the impact of those patterns on both the government and the nation; some of the ways longstanding norms have recently shifted, and continue to shift; the larger historical forces and long-term trends driving those changes; and the theoretical questions, logistical challenges and ethical dilemmas these changes pose for both political journalists and those they cover. The course will equally cover the practice of political reporting, including weekly analysis and discussion of current press coverage, in-class exercises and simulations, readings from academic and journalistic sources, and visits from leading political reporters and former spokespeople able to offer a firsthand perspective on the topics.

Full details for ENGL 3941 - Political Journalism

Taking its inspiration from David Hume's famous remark that "reason ought only to be the slave of the passions," this course will consider the Enlightenment's "science of human nature" not as the triumph of rationality but as a drama of competing psychologies of the passions. We will consider how the priority accorded the passion of self-preservation or life, the body, and the sexual and acquisitive drives subverted traditional ethics and was countervailed by compassion, sympathy, and other sentiments. We will read a short story and novels as well as some moral and political philosophy (Margaret Cavendish, Hobbes, Defoe, Cleland, Rousseau, Sterne, Laclos, Wollstonecraft, and Nietzsche) to address such topics as the "marriage contract" and the gender politics and economics of the family; love and benevolence in relation to law and obligation; medical discourse in relation to sexual "criminality"; pornography as materialist science and sentimental-sexual education; suffering and the ethics and politics of pity. We will also read theoretical work by Althusser, Foucault and Butler to focus on narrative form and mechanisms of identity formation. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4315 - Passions and Literary Enlightenment

In this course, we will explore the literature and history of Harlem, beginning with an examination of James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts's Harlem is Nowhere.  We will go on to explore selected literatures of the Harlem Renaissance by reading authors such as Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.  Though the dates and even the very notion of the period itself are open to debate, the Harlem Renaissance peaked during the 1920s in the wake of the Great Migration to the urban North, and declined with the onset of the Great Depression.  We will consider overlapping literary movements that shaped the Harlem Renaissance profoundly, from modernism to Negritude.  This movement established important foundations for the contemporary black art scene in New York City and the development of major institutions such as the Apollo Theater, the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  Because it encompassed a range of other art forms and media beyond literature, such as painting, photography, and music, we will explore the work of noted photographers of the period from Carl Van Vechten to James Van Der Zee, artists such as Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and Palmer Hayden, and musicians such as Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith.  We will read selected writings on Harlem from Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes, and study the recent fictions by Mat Johnson, Colson Whitehead, Sapphire, Karla FC Holloway and A'Lelia Bundles.  We will draw on a range of media and technology, including resources based at the Library of Congress such as "Drop Me Off in Harlem" and "Guide to Harlem Renaissance Materials," along with contemporary photographic projects such as Gayatri Spivak and Alice Attie's Harlem and Harlem:  A Century in Images by Deborah Willis and several co-authors.  

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4508 - From the Harlem Renaissance to New Harlem Novels

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, CA-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4605 - Black Speculative Fiction

How do poems travel in the world? How does the world travel in poems? In this seminar, we'll read global case studies in the ways poems can sanctify or protest territorial and linguistic borders, as well as reading diverse critical accounts of the translation, marketing, and archiving of "world literature." We'll study how poetry compares with other communication technologies, enacting its own forms of transit, ecology, and migration. Our readings (across all of time, though focused on the 19th-21st centuries) will investigate how race, class, and gender inflect verse's navigations of local conditions and cosmopolitan scale. Authors may include T.S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, W.B. Yeats, Lorna Goodison, Yi Sang, Derek Walcott, Daphne Marlatt, Christopher Okigbo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Ilya Kaminsky, Ishion Hutchinson, and Valzhyna Mort.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4760 - World Poetry of the Pluriverse: Regional Forms and Global Readers

What innovations in form, style, genre, and subject matter have characterized the novel in the 21st century? What is the status of the novel in the wake of postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, post-humanism, and the other "posts" of literary theory? Are we witnessing a blurring of theory and fiction? This course will explore a number of key developments and trends in the 21st century novel, such as the rise of genre fiction (fantasy, science fiction, the Western, the "rock novel"), speculative fiction, new historical realisms, comic/graphic novels, philosophical fiction, among others trends. Our writers may include Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, Sally Rooney, Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell, and Jennifer Egan.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4765 - The Twenty-First Century Novel

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4810 - Advanced Poetry Writing

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4811 - Advanced Narrative Writing

The most studied and written about work in Western Literature outside the Bible, Hamlet according to Harold Bloom, is our secular savior and our ambassador to death. This course centers on a close reading of the play. Through research and assigned readings the course tests theoretical viewpoints about the play against the text itself by reading the theory in relationship to the production history.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

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

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 is: Reading Joyce's Ulysses. This class counts toward the post-1800 requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

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 Ellis Hanson, 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

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

Full details for ENGL 6120 - Beowulf

The seminar focuses on one of the most complex and pressing problems of our time: political theology. Political theology articulates the link between faith and reason in an attempt to ground political community in a language of legitimacy. First articulated in classical antiquity by Marcus Varro in Rome and later by Augustine, political theology is a way of naming and understanding the complex problem of authority. As distinct from religion, political theology is an (ongoing) social, political and cultural discourse of power over people's real lives. Whether (in modern terms) that governmental power has to do with abortion or gay marriage, political theological arguments always need to harness and synthesize these two sources. Early modern literature plays a crucial rule in this history of articulations.

Full details for ENGL 6271 - Critical Problems in Shakespeare Studies: Political Theology

The term "lyric" is uncommon before the sixteenth century, but the songs and short, non-narrative poetry that evidently constitute those traditions reach back to the beginnings of written literature. "Theory of the lyric" is a contested field, with much at stake in how poetry should be assessed and appreciated. Beginning with ancient and early medieval traditions, the seminar will focus on the star-studded period from the early fourteenth through the early seventeenth century, particularly Petrarch, Machaut, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Sidney, Spencer, and Shakespeare. It will seek to explore their poems within literary exchanges as well as cultural history, from economics to media to colonialism to changes in the English language.

Full details for ENGL 6295 - Early Lyric in Transition

This course juxtaposes some of the core strains of current post-humanist theory—new materialism or "thing theory," the "affective turn," ecocriticism or environmental humanities, and literary animal studies. Using eighteenth-century literature, culture, and intellectual discourse as a starting point and then sampling related materials in the Anglo-American tradition from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will define these theoretical scenarios, and evaluate the broader impact of the other-than-human on literary theory and on formal critique. Texts include Newton, Opticks; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature; Burney, Evelina; Nabokov, Lolita; Cowper, The Task; Voltaire, Candide; Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain; Kendall, Keeper's Travels; The Dog of Knowledge; The Biography of a Spaniel; Auster, Timbuktu. 

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

This course will look at how Black women writers negotiated enslavement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow era segregation while also managing to find avenues of joy, escapism, and a certain kind of freedom through art-making. In addition to reading primary texts by Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Bond, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others we will also look at critical and theoretical work by Hortense Spillers, Saidiyah Hartman, Barbara Fields, and Karen Fields.

Full details for ENGL 6560 - Politics and Joy in Black Women's Writing

"You didn't see anything," a woman in a movie says to her dubious lover. "No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don't understand."  What is desire in a movie, and how do we know it when we see it or feel it? How do the images, sounds, and narratives of a cinematic event engage us erotically? How might we want to revise classic psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories of desire and cinema in light of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st century? We will focus especially on metacinematic work by Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others.

Full details for ENGL 6600 - Erotics of Visuality

This graduate seminar focuses on Asian American studies through the dual lenses of theory and literature. Asian American literature provides a consideration of and reflection on Asian American subjectivities and bodies, collectively and differentially raced, gendered, and sexualized, which condition discourses and politics of American nation, empire, and sociality. The course is structured around pairings of texts, academic and literary, to enhance our own scholarly engagement with Asian American fiction and poetry. There is an additional focus on recently published scholarship and current concerns in Asian American studies, such as comparative and critical ethnic studies as well as queer studies.

Full details for ENGL 6630 - Asian American Theory and Literature

Settler colonialism now circulates as a critical orientation across a range of disciplines as it reorients how we understand arrival and dispersal, possession and dispossession in the global north and south. It is also often presumed synonymous with Indigenous studies. This class will consider how Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies differ as we read texts and case studies that offer intersectional analyses of settler colonial studies as it has developed through postcolonial studies. Readings will draw from and be situated through interventions from global Indigenous studies, Black studies, queer studies, and feminist studies as they shape the political, historical, and contemporary understandings of race, land, capitalism, and nation within the United States and Canada in particular, with attention given to other geographies as well.

Full details for ENGL 6680 - The Settler Colonial Turn

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

This course will examine 20th century black critical thought. We will interrogate cultural theories and literary texts from African, Caribbean, African-American, Black British and Afro-Brazilian communities. As such discourses of post-coloniality, cultural criticism, Black literary theories and philosophies, black feminist discourses, theories of decolonization will be some of the major areas of inquiry. While the specific identified texts will form the core of our discussion, analyses will draw on a variety of other works by other authors more relevant. Here, Black literature is being used as an umbrella term to bring together and examine works by men and women who adopt the term "black" as a political descriptor of their subject positions and locations in society. The major emphasis will be on the intellectual and creative contributions of people of African descent.

Full details for ENGL 6742 - Black Literary and Cultural Theory

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 Lab

Early English writers were of two minds about their homeland: they cultivated the mythology that the English were the New Israel, while they were intensely aware (and constantly reminded by Continental authorities) of their status as a backwater at the margins of Christendom. Scripture modeled for them the concept of divinely sanctioned colonization. It also portended for them the precarity of such an elite status, challenged in their day by Viking attacks, corruption in the Church, and various ecological disasters. Such conflicting ideas about their place in the world generated sophisticated reflections about difference with respect to what is now called "race," "nationality," "indigeneity," and the status of "the human" in the world. Readings include numerous genres (poetry, sermons, riddles, and saints' lives available in Old English and translation) as well as a wide variety of relevant contemporary theory.  

Full details for ENGL 7100 - Advanced Old English

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

Full details for ENGL 7810 - MFA Seminar: Poetry

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

Full details for ENGL 7811 - MFA Seminar: Fiction

This 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