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 hopes to find the cure for how high school and college might have beaten the love of reading out of you, and to help you find a way to love reading again in an environment that (while preparing you for upper-level English classes) stresses pleasure and joy. Emphasis will be on building skills, finding creative ways to respond to your own reading interests, 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) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

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

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ENGL 1270 - FWS: Writing About Literature

Animal companions are signs of our modernity. They can confirm our humanity, or call it into question. This course studies modern pet keeping and the human relation to animals. We will begin with the eighteenth-century pet keeping "fad," and turn to a focus on the literature of pets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moving from questions of how literature can represent animals to discussions of the social dimensions of petkeeping and the ethics of animal rights. The course will include a discussion of the modern veterinarian's relationship with the companion animal and its owner, and a class forum on the ethics of the treatment of animals. Readings will include works by William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, and Paul Auster.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2200 - The Idea of the Pet in Literature and History

What makes us laugh? What made people laugh in the past, and how has it changed? This course will take a long view of comedy, juxtaposing its great popularity in early modern England with its appeal in the present day. Beginning with Shakespeare's comedies of mistaken identity, we will grapple along the way with the diverse pleasures offered by clowns, jokes, satire, the Simpsons, and television sitcoms. Readings will explore how and why humor works and consider themes such as the nature of identity, cruelty and physical comedy, the potential of humor for political critique, and what it means to take pleasure (or discomfort) from a literary or artistic object.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 2240 - Comedy: Renaissance and Now

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, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 2350 - Literature and Medicine

This course introduces students to major American poets from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is designed for anyone wanting to deepen their knowledge of and appreciation for poetry while also addressing its relationship to modern American social and cultural history. It addresses questions about what poetry is for, why it is often "difficult," how it is related to language-play as a basic human drive that engages with personal anxieties, bodily rhythms, social and existential tensions, and the riddles of existence. Another through-line of this course is the relationship of poetry to democracy in the United States.

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

Full details for ENGL 2690 - American Poetry Since 1850

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-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 2703 - Thinking Media

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

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

Full details for ENGL 2715 - Memoir

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.

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

Full details for ENGL 2730 - Children's Literature

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

Full details for ENGL 2785 - Comic Books and Graphic Novels

Full details for ENGL 2800 - Creative Writing

Full details for ENGL 2880 - 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

This course will explore how in the body of world literature humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning.  Spanning from ancient epic and origin myths through nineteenth century novels and colonial narratives to contemporary science fiction, we will inquire, through our reading: what is a world?  How does the labor of the imagination construct a world or the world and deconstruct or undo worlds?  Readings will range widely across time and world space (with authors such as Hesiod, Balzac, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Bacigalupi) and will include attention to contemporary theories of world literature.

Full details for ENGL 2971 - Reading for the End of Time

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

Full details for ENGL 3120 - Beowulf

Full details for ENGL 3270 - Shakespeare: The Late Plays

Full details for ENGL 3280 - The Bible as Literature

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 - American Theatre on Stage and Screen II (1960-Present)

Full details for ENGL 3440 - Merchants, Whalers, Pirates, Sailors: Early American Sea-faring Literature

Full details for ENGL 3460 - Nineteenth Century British and American Poetry: Wordsworth to Dickinson

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 from 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.

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-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3565 - Black Ecoliterature

This is a course on Irish writing of the modern period. In our readings over the semester (which will include some of the twentieth century's greatest literary texts), we will cover the development of Irish writing from the Yeats-led Irish Revival of the century's early years through Joyce's high modernist virtuosity to Bowen's Bloomsbury-inflected fiction to the proto-postmodernisms of O'Brien and Beckett. Along the way we will also examine how Irish modernism raises fundamental questions about such things as: the relation between language and national identity; the nature of modernism's "newness"; colonial, postcolonial, and "semicolonial" culture; the political uses of literature; and the contending forces of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the modern period.

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

Full details for ENGL 3571 - The Modern Irish Writers

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) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

Crime fiction simply dominates our screen time: White Lotus, Law and Order, NCIS, Psych, Sherlock, Only Murders in the Building, True Detective, Breaking Bad. But crime fiction is rife with trouble—femme fatales, drug-addled sleuths, "random" murders concealing menacing conspiracies. And literary culture loves to make trouble for crime fiction as well—to attack, parody, reinvent, complicate, and rejoice in it. This course will explore classic mystery story design in Poe, Doyle, and Wilkie Collins, and later fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Lindsay, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Tana French, Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. We'll also analyze films and television episodes directed by Boon Joon-ho, Sally Wainwright, and Spike Lee.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3747 - The Trouble with Crime Fiction

This course explores the creative cross-pollination between mass culture and avant-garde art, addressing key concepts in 20th century aesthetics (the middlebrow, the spectacle, pastiche, kitsch) and the evolution of the category of art itself. The mediating conditions of class, race, gender, and sexuality will be central to our examination of these conceptual histories, as will changes in the means of artistic production and distribution. Interdisciplinary and intermedial in its focus, the course will include texts by Theodor Adorno, Amiri Baraka, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Burger, Guy Debord, Clement Greenberg, Cathy Park Hong, Griselda Pollock, Rosalind Krauss, Dwight MacDonald, Fred Moten, Sianne Ngai, Marjorie Perloff, Susan Sontag, and Hito Steyerl.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 3753 - Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde

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) (CA-AG)

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) (CA-AG, LA-AG, WRT-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3820 - 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) (CA-AG, LA-AG, WRT-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3840 - 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) (WRT-AG)

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

With the publication of his Utopia, Thomas More coined the name of a new genre of literature in which the writer posits an ideal society – and sometimes an impossibly ideal society. In this course, we'll explore the sources of More's Utopia in political philosophy and its legacy in speculative, socialist, and science fiction. What do these literary experiments tell us about how society would have to be organized to be free of sexism, racism, inequality, war, and ecological ruination. Authors may include Thomas More, James Harrington, Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, William Morris, Marge Piercy, Ursula LeGuin, Toni Morrison.

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

Full details for ENGL 3901 - Utopia

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 Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bolaño, Césaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

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

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

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

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

Full details for ENGL 3934 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious yet empowering nature of the body. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious yet empowering nature of the body. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

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

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. Along the way, we will consider some of the fictional works (e.g. by Turgenev, Dostoevsky) that have been important in this nonfictional tradition, as well as poetry produced by the revolutionary currents we discuss. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, and German leftist political figures like Piotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Ernst Toller, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? How have literary movements intersected with revolutionary writings? With special attention to the questions of gender, ethnicity, and race.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 3989 - The Revolutionary as Author: Autobiography and Political Myth

This seminar will explore the English language and its literatures in its most diverse centuries, which 19th century philologists saw as the "middle" span: after the collapse of Old English language, poetic style, and indigenous power-centers at the Norman Conquest (1066), up to printing (1476), the beginnings of "standard Modern English," claims to an "English literary tradition," and the origins of Atlantic adventurism and imperialism. Between those benchmarks we'll consider multilingualism, English linguistic diversity and changes, social identity, literary forms, and ideas about language and literature, sampling many Middle English works and more fully reading the "Katherine Group," Gawain-poet, Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich's Showings.

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

Full details for ENGL 4133 - From the Conquest to Caxton: Middle English Language, Literatures, History

Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? At a time when reality appears dystopian, many are quick to dismiss utopian visions as naïve or irresponsible. In this seminar, we take on the critical and imaginative task of considering what utopias can tell us about our pasts, presents, and possible futures. We encounter two centuries of utopias in which communes have displaced the family, mutual aid has taken the place of capitalist individualism, and sexuality is no longer linked to property rights. While these speculative times and places seek to overcome capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the climate crisis, they remain haunted by these figures. Our treatment of utopias in theory and literature therefore includes a range of ambivalent affects and genres, from critical and ambiguous utopias to philosophical treatises and manifestos.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4380 - Imagining Utopia

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 4509 - Toni Morrison's Novels

The driving dialectic in post-colonial studies has been the colonizer/colonized, or the Third World vs. the West. But slowly the field is letting go of this "arrested dialectic" and in its place various triangulations are emerging: e.g. transnationalism, world literature, the global novel, and global south literary studies. Starting with a walk through the emerging theoretical concepts of world/global/transnational literature, we will primarily focus on a global south reading of African literature (itself a contested term), and perennial questions around language and translation. Specifically we will look at how writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, V.S. Naipul, NoViolet Bulawayo, and MG Vassanji challenge the post-colonial discourse and how a global south reading provides an uncomfortable conversation with transnational and world literature theories and concepts.

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

Full details for ENGL 4511 - The Global South Novel and World Literature

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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

We will examine cultural productions by East and Southeast Asians and their diasporas that imagine speculative, science fictional, magical realist, weird realist, or otherwise non-realist worlds. Paying particular attention to the legacies of militarism and empire, we will consider how imaginaries of East Asia are entangled with the U.S.-led Cold War system, the post-Cold War dominance of finance capitalism, and climate change. Tracking connections between diverse regions and peoples, we will explore how Asians and Asian diasporas dovetail in their visions of historical memory, present-day crisis, and future possibilities. These speculative worlds will prompt us to reflect on the world we live in now and the histories we have inherited.

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

Full details for ENGL 4567 - Speculative East Asias

As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to "undo" borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb "desbordar" (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies

This class offers the opportunity to read James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses in relation to major concepts and methods of media studies, book history, and material text scholarship.  Challenging, multifarious, and often very funny, Ulysses takes place over the course of a single day in the colonized metropolis of Dublin at the dawn of the age of global communications.  Drawing upon the unique resources of Cornell University Library (including its important collection of Joyce manuscripts) and Cornell Cinema, this class will attend to the numerous forms of media Joyce describes and imagines, to the conditions of print publication that made the novel possible (and others that tried to ban it), and to the electric and electronic media art that responded to Ulysses and tried to reproduce its effects.

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

Full details for ENGL 4700 - Reading the Media of Joyce's Ulysses

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) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

This seminar investigates the role of social media in contemporary literary production and reception. We will understand both "social media" and "literature" broadly, examining literature about and written for social media, online communities focused on book reviewing such as BookTube and Goodreads, platforms for social reading and writing like Wattpad and AO3, and the use of social media by publishers and authors in promoting literature. We will read scholarship in media studies, reception studies, and publishing studies to understand how social media shapes the contemporary literary field and how literature shapes social media. Throughout, we will ask what it means to consider literature as a social phenomenon, foregrounding questions about its conditions of production and the people who read and respond to it online.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4771 - Social Media and Contemporary Literature

This course focuses on questions both timely—"How can news be fake?"—and timeless—"What counts as the truth?" Each of our four course units will present scenes in the history of technology that complicate the answers to these questions. How, for example, has Big Data revived the idea of theological omniscience that Nietzsche pronounced dead in 1882? How did atlases and encyclopedias inform the notion of "scientific objectivity" in the 19th century? How has photography and film complicated the truism, "I'll believe it when I see it"? Focusing on these and other moments of historical certainty and doubt, we will return to contemporary debates about the role of communication technology in presenting facts ("alternative" or otherwise) to an informed public. We will end our course by questioning what type of hope, confidence or resistance we can find in a world without a solid epistemological foundation for truth.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ENGL 4780 - Truth and Media: Searching for Epistemological Certainty

Students will build on coursework in "Communicating Climate Change" to design, create and launch climate communications projects focused on reducing Cornell's emissions. This will involve research into Cornell's operations, creativity in developing effective communications, a focus on climate justice, and engagement with Cornell students, faculty, and staff. Projects may include reducing air travel, fume hood energy waste, and meat consumption, and addressing misconceptions about tap water, lighting, and food waste.

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

Full details for ENGL 4795 - Climate Communications Capstone

This course is intended for creative writers who have completed  ENGL 3840 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) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 4800 - Advanced Poetry Writing

This course is intended for narrative writing students who have completed ENGL 3820 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) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ENGL 4801 - Advanced Narrative Writing

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

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

Full details for ENGL 4850 - Reading for Writers

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

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 6021 - 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.

Full details for ENGL 6120 - Beowulf

This seminar will explore the English language and its literatures in its most diverse centuries, which 19th century philologists saw as the "middle" span: after the collapse of Old English language, poetic style, and indigenous power-centers at the Norman Conquest (1066), up to printing (1476), the beginnings of "standard Modern English," claims to an "English literary tradition," and the origins of Atlantic adventurism and imperialism. Between those benchmarks we'll consider multilingualism, English linguistic diversity and changes, social identity, literary forms, and ideas about language and literature, sampling many Middle English works and more fully reading the "Katherine Group," Gawain-poet, Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich's Showings.

Full details for ENGL 6133 - From the Conquest to Caxton: Middle English Language, Literatures, History

How do narratives work? What kinds of social functions do stories perform? And how can the theory and analysis of narrative help us to grasp and shape power relations? The course will introduce the history of classical narrative theory, from Aristotle and Lessing to Todorov and Genette, but it will focus especially on new trends in queer, critical race, and feminist narrative theory, and on the uses of narrative form across disciplines and social spaces. You will be expected to write a few  short responses to the readings, practice giving a formal conference-style oral presentation, and write a final essay based on the conference paper.

Full details for ENGL 6155 - Theory and Analysis of Narrative

From rich paradigms of sympathy and sentiment adapted from the eighteenth century to newer theories of unconsciousness and crowd psychology, Victorian literature reflects shifting conceptions of feeling. This course examines how psychological claims ground the forms and experiences of reading in the Victorian period, as well as the recent theoretical turn to affect, which emerged in particular rejoinder to critical trends in Victorian studies. What evidence is there that emotions are experienced, discussed, or represented in historically and culturally specific ways? How does the work of feeling register in literary form? Readings will include novels (Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Schreiner); narrative poems (Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Meredith); contemporary prose; and theoretical engagements with affect (Armstrong, Felski, Deleuze, Sedgwick, Ngai, Berlant, recent debates in Critical Inquiry).

Full details for ENGL 6460 - Studies in Victorian Literature: Reading Feeling

We shall look at early South African and African-language literature of the late 1880s through the early 1940s in relation to the literature of decolonization that spanned the 1950s through the 1980s, and the contemporary generation of established and emerging continental and diaspora African writers of international renown. Some of the questions around the misreading of African literature will include: Why did Chinua Achebe's generation privilege African literature in English despite the early South African example? What are the costs of locating the start of Africa's literary tradition in the wrong literary and historical period? What does it mean for the current generation of writers and scholars of African literature not to have an imaginative consciousness of their literary past?

Full details for ENGL 6485 - The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.

Full details for ENGL 6513 - Toni Morrison's Novels

What was the position of literary writing among the new media technologies that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century?  How did modernist writers respond to a social and political situation in which access to media and information was at once widely distributed, and consolidated by corporations and the state?  This class pursues continuities between past and present, against today's claims of heroically disruptive innovation and new crises for literature. Ths course will engage key media theorists in the context of extended analyses of two major 20th-century works — James Joyce's Ulysses and Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama — among other key intertexts of the period.

Full details for ENGL 6525 - Modernism, Media, and Mediation

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

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

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

Full details for ENGL 6710 - Law and Literature

Considering the etymological roots of "poetry," this course explores the idea of poetry as making, creation, fabrication, composition. How have poets and theorists of lyric understood the relationship between poetry and creation and between poetry and worldmaking?  How and under what circumstances did poetry come to be identified as making and doing rather than observing and knowing?  To get a better grip on this peculiar idea of "making" that links language to materiality, to the body, and to the polity, we'll explore the relationship between poiesis and mimesis, poiesis and techne, and poiesis and praxis.

Full details for ENGL 6815 - Poiesis

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

Full details for ENGL 7800 - MFA Seminar: Poetry

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

Full details for ENGL 7801 - MFA Seminar: Fiction

In general, Reading for Writers examines literary works through the eyes of a writer, focusing on the craft of literature. While the class is geared toward MFA students, all graduate students are welcome to enroll. Topics vary with each section and semester. For descriptions, please consult the class roster.

Full details for ENGL 7850 - Reading for Writers

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