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

What stories should we tell about climate change, and how should we tell them? What forms of communication will convince a broad public to accept scientific consensus, to overcome cynicism or apathy, and to take collective action, beyond simply raising awareness or changing individual behavior? We will examine and practice with the powers (and limits) of selected media and types of data, both textual and visual, qualitative and quantitative, such as: human-interest narratives, photographs, tables and graphs, journalistic and technical writing, social-media posts, public performances. Such strategies can engage our imagination as well as our reason, provoking not only fear or despair but also optimism and hope. Assignments may include syntheses of articles and analyses of media artifacts; public-facing documents or exhibits; and research presentations.

Full details for ENGL 1125 - FWS: Climate Change and Communications

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

Full details for ENGL 1130 - FWS: Writing the Environment

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

Full details for ENGL 1134 - FWS: True Stories

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1158 - FWS: American Voices

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

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1167 - FWS: Reading Now

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

Full details for ENGL 1168 - FWS: Cultural Studies

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

Full details for ENGL 1170 - FWS: Short Stories

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

Full details for ENGL 1183 - FWS: Word and Image

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

Full details for ENGL 1191 - FWS: British Literature

A fast-paced, intro-level class on data science, text analysis, and AI in the humanities. The course examines how computational methods can help analyze millions of books; how data and machine learning have changed the questions humanists can ask (and answer); what it means to do research in literary studies, history, and related disciplines; and what challenges lie ahead. Assigned readings drawn mostly from recent research papers. Technical material introduced as needed. Suitable for students in all programs and colleges. No programming or other prerequisites.

Full details for ENGL 1340 - Books as Data

Since the Industrial Revolution, an explosion of new technologies has emerged that continuously transformed our senses of selfhood and identity, privacy and community, imagination and the real. From the newspaper to the LLM, these technologies have also fed upon and transformed our speech, writing, and language. But, as this survey of modern literatures in English will explore, writing is also itself a powerful and enduring technology — one through which we shape thought, retrieve it from the past, send it to the future, and travel in space. Surveying 250 years of writing in English, we will ask how writing caused and responded to radical changes in the meaning of the human, and how it represented, contested, or collaborated with the long-burning explosion of new media — from the telephone to the television, from notebooks to typewriters, radio to computers.

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

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

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

Romances were, essentially, medieval science fiction and fantasy writing. They were how authors in the Middle Ages imagined things beyond rational understanding that, at the same time, greatly extended the possibilities of the world around them. The course will survey some medieval narratives concerned with representative voyages to the otherworld or with the impinging of the otherworld upon ordinary experience. The syllabus will normally include some representative Old Irish otherworld literature: selections from The Mabinogion; selections from the Lays of Marie de France; Chretian de Troye's Erec, Yvain, and Lancelot; and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will finish by looking at a few contemporary otherworld romances, such as selections from J.R.R. Tolkein. All readings will be in modern English. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

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

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.

Full details for ENGL 2240 - Comedy: Renaissance and Now

Why don’t we tell it straight? Narratives and media today are “out of line.” No longer primarily sequential or episodic, stories branch out, jump back and forth, tie themselves into loops, provide alternative versions. What was once the terrain of the experimental is now true for many popular culture texts. In this course, we will explore a range of texts, films, and TV shows that are “out of line.” While our focus will be on popular culture—from TV shows like Westworld to films like Nolan’s Inception or Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once—we will also build a framework of narrative theory and take our inspiration from experimental literary texts such as those by Calvino, Perec, or Borges.

Full details for ENGL 2272 - Out of Line: Introduction to Narrative and Media

The production of North American Indigenous literatures began long before European colonization, and persists in a variety of printed, sung, carved, painted, written, spoken, and digital media. From oral traditions transmitted through memory and mnemonics to contemporary genres and media, Native North American authors offer Indigenous perspectives on social, political, and environmental experience, through deft artistry and place-specific aesthetics. Our attention will focus on the contexts from which particular Native American literatures emerge, the ethics to consider when entering Indigenous intellectual territory, and close attention to common themes and techniques that frequently appear in contemporary Native American literature. Readings will feature a range of novels, poetry, short fiction, graphic novel/comics, and film.

Full details for ENGL 2600 - Introduction to Native American Literature

This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Full details for ENGL 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

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

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

The history of communication technology is marked by momentous births and brutal deaths: “Television kills telephony,” James Joyce wrote in Finnegan’s Wake, fifty years before “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Novelists have participated in and documented this history, exploring the media of human communication and competing over the representation of reality. This course considers the novel as a new technology in the 18th and 19th-centuries and examines the techniques that 20th and 21st-century authors have adopted to represent and assimilate newer media forms, including telegraphy, cinema, the tape recorder, television, and the internet. Reading works by Adolfo Bioy Casares, DG Compton, Linda Rosenkrantz, and Patricia Lockwood, among others, we will consider how the novel retains its “novelty” today. Does it still merit its name?

Full details for ENGL 2710 - Novel Technologies

Nondisabled writers and filmmakers often treat disability as a symbolic characteristic—disabled characters are most often either saintly or villainous. But what is disability? How do disabled writers depict disability? In this course, we will explore representations of ability and disability through the lens of Disability Studies. Concurrently, we will focus on the history of disability as a concept and as a lived experience. We also will examine how disability intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and more. Likely readings will include older texts such as Shakespeare’s Richard III as well as contemporary fiction, poetry, and essays by disabled and nondisabled writers.

Full details for ENGL 2783 - Writing Bodies and Minds: Disability and Literature

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

Full details for ENGL 2800 - 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. Please see the Class Roster for more details. This course satisfies requirements for the English minor but not for the English major. Taken with the instructor’s permission, and with the letter grade option, it satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. If counted toward the First-Year Writing Seminar requirement, the course will not count toward ALC-AS.

Full details for ENGL 2880 - Expository Writing

This course offers an introduction to Canadian literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with a special focus on the multilingual, multicultural character of Canadian cultural production. We'll take a look at texts from both French-speaking (in translation) and English-speaking Canada, including Indigenous and immigrant authors who locate themselves at once inside and outside those linguistic traditions. Special emphasis will be given to queer voices and other engagements with the representation of gender, sexuality, and desire. An additional independent study, conducted in French, may be taken by students who wish to explore Francophone material in greater depth.

Full details for ENGL 2901 - Contemporary Canadian Literature

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

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 3120 - Beowulf

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

Full details for ENGL 3190 - Chaucer

Renaissance humanists thought learning should be fun and wanted to replace stodgy scholastic disputation with rhetorical playfulness. So, the poetry of this period takes pleasure very seriously. In the course, we’ll be looking at how the poets of the 16th and early 17th centuries emphasized the relationship of poetry to the senses; how poetry was a privileged medium for inspiring erotic feeling, religious devotion, and political action; and how the print revolution changed the character of verse writing, its authors, and its readers. Authors will include Wyatt, Surrey, Gascoigne, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Whitney, Lanyer, Wroth, Donne, Herbert and others. This course can be used to fulfil the pre-1800 requirement.

Full details for ENGL 3230 - Renaissance Poetry

Ideas change the world. Sometimes the same ideas can do tremendous good and also cause great suffering. In this course we will consider violence and revolutionary changes through the prism of European 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thought. Thinking through the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Catherine Macaulay, Rousseau and others, we will explore how African philosophers and writers such as Emmanuel Eze, Paulin Hotoundji and Chinua Achebe are in conversation with the enlightenment as well as African thought.

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

Jane Eyre and zombies, A Christmas Carol in 3D, PBS miniseries: why is nineteenth-century fiction so un-dead? The plot of the Victorian novel—sexual betrayal, pathological greed, the sadistic damage wrought on helpless children— reflects wrenching social, scientific, and technological transformations whose global sweep rivals that of our own era’s conflicts. Intertwining domestic and imperial spaces, realistic fiction embodied the most innovative attempt to grasp and contain such seismic shifts in an entertaining idiom for a rising mass readership. These works refract the cultural debates of the age and suggest sources of redemption. We can take pleasure in them even as we critically analyze how the Victorians live now. Likely authors include: Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Collins, Hardy, and Stoker.

Full details for ENGL 3470 - The Victorian Novel

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

Our focus in this course will be on the vibrantly varied body of poetry produced in the United States during the 20th century. Encompassing strains of worldly celebration and prophetic rage, visionary ecstasy and minute attention to ordinary life, this poetry breaks new ground in every decade, mixing formal and stylistic innovation with a continuously expanding sense of the national landscape in all its demographic and cultural diversity. Poets to be studied include Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and others.

Full details for ENGL 3525 - Howls and Love Songs: Twentieth Century American Poetry

“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of “art for art’s sake” and all that was considered exquisite, ironic, or obscene, the Decadent aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of language, beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional moral strictures. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, and especially Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and design, including music by Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss and artworks by James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau.

Full details for ENGL 3550 - Decadence

This course will trace ideas about photography, its technical processes, as well as the presence of photographic images in literary expression, museum exhibitions, institutional practices, and popular media from the nineteenth century to the present. From the album to the archive and from the printed page to the touchscreen, we will examine the ways in which the interrelationship between photography and literature alters our understanding of temporality, knowledge, memory, mimesis, history, affect, identity, power, and desire. Reading and viewing widely across genre, medium, and format will motivate our own expressive practices: crafting interpretive essays, penning arts reviews, designing exhibitions, and taking photographs.

Full details for ENGL 3706 - Photo-Text

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 Mieville, 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.

Full details for ENGL 3747 - The Trouble with Crime Fiction

Whereas human rights find legal expression in visionary documents like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the many principles tied to human rights have long been debated by philosophers, artists, theologians, and writers. This course studies the evolution of human rights as cultural artifacts, examining how ideas about rights and humanitarianism were fashioned within literature, philosophy, film, public debate, and various international legal forums over history. Through readings covering large topics like crimes against humanity, immigration, abolitionism, and universal suffrage, we will ask: how did the world assent to a global culture of human rights? What hopes and dreams have human rights embodied? Conversely, what recurring critiques have been raised about the norms informing human rights?

Full details for ENGL 3781 - Human Rights in Law and Culture

This course focuses upon the writing of fiction or related narrative forms. May include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. Many students will choose to write short stories, but excerpts from longer works will also be accepted.

Full details for ENGL 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.

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.

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 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, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

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. Taught in English.

Full details for ENGL 3916 - Fables of Capitalism

How was the category "woman" constituted in the Middle Ages? Not assuming that women were the same then as now, this course, in dialogue with contemporary trans and genderqueer theory, will look at medieval gender in a new light. Considering works by women, like the Book of Margery Kempe, some primary texts about women, like the trial of Joan of Arc, and some scholarship about alternatives to the binary of women and men, like Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, this course will examine "woman" as a constructed category and "The Middle Ages" as one instance of the long work of making involved in issuing women into the common-sense category that they now occupy.

Full details for ENGL 4116 - Inventing Women in the Middle Ages

An introduction to the arboreal humanities, this course examines the status of trees and forests at the intersection of ecological, aesthetic, artistic, and literary concerns. In addition to scientific texts and scholarly treatises, we will read popular accounts and literary works that examine the being of trees and forests in relation to and as conditions of possibility of human culture. Taught in English.

Full details for ENGL 4225 - Arboreal Humanities: Ecology, Aesthetics, and Literature

Black Feminism is an umbrella term that describes a range of social/political practices and theories that are historically rooted in and extrapolated from the embodied experiences of Black women. In this course we will investigate a variety of foundational and contemporary texts within the Black feminist intellectual archive. Questions we will consider: What makes someone or something (i.e. an action or practice) Black Feminist? What is Black Feminism’s purpose?

Full details for ENGL 4526 - Black Feminism: Practice and Purpose

In this course, we shall be looking at the he said, she said of colonial/anti-colonial literature. In particular we shall look at texts where European and African authors have been in direct conversation, with the hope of developing a deeper understanding of what was at stake in the colonial projects, and how both the colonizer and colonized understood colonization and resistance – and the contradictions in inherent in each. Looking at the works of Mannoni, Fanon, Nawal El Saadawi, Micere Mugo, Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, and others, we shall try to paint a picture that engages the voices and vulnerabilities of both lion and hunter.

Full details for ENGL 4570 - Africa Writes Back: Colonizer and the Colonized

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.

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

This seminar will explore the extraordinary literature, music, art, and film emerging from and about Los Angeles. As a global city, Los Angeles offers a glimpse of a world in transit; one that challenges preconceptions and established forms. Paying special attention to the work of Latinx creators, but also engaging with the many communities, including Indigenous, African American, and Asian American, that make art in LA, this course will offer students a chance to study and enjoy a wide variety of creative forms while also learning about resilience, innovative resistance movements, and the complexity of collaboration.

Full details for ENGL 4612 - LA Stories: Literature, Film, and Music from Los Angeles

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

Full details for ENGL 4675 - The Environmental Imagination in American Literature

This course compares narrative method and statistical modeling historically, teaching the history of predictive data techniques from the 19th century to the present while reading short-form literature - Aesop, Gogol, Dickinson - to compare the stories the numbers tell to narrative itself. The intent is to illuminate the rhetorical forms that prediction uses while studying the development of its quantitative techniques.

Full details for ENGL 4709 - Modeling between Numbers and Stories

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.

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

The function of the theatre critic is well understood, but the role of the dramaturg remains mysterious in the American theatre. Yet theatre critics and dramaturgs use many of the same research, analytic, and writing skills, and need the same knowledge of history, literature, and culture, to perform their duties effectively. This practicum, designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, will allow participants to develop the skills central to these complementary professions. The course will include units on writing effective performance reviews, working with student playwrights on new script development, preparing informational materials for directors, designers and actors, writing program essays and other informational materials for audiences, script preparation for production, and selecting/preparing translations for production. While our focus will be on the theatre, students with interest in applying these skills to film/television/media or dance contexts are welcome.

Full details for ENGL 4766 - Practicum in Performance Criticism and Dramaturgy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Graduate Creative Writing Special Seminar allows writing students to learn about craft from a visiting creative writer. Exact content will vary depending on the instructor, but all seminars will take an in-depth look at the craft of writing. For topic description, please consult the Class Roster.

Full details for ENGL 5800 - Graduate Creative Writing Special Seminar

How was the category "woman" constituted in the Middle Ages? Not assuming that women were the same then as now, this course, in dialogue with contemporary trans and genderqueer theory, will look at medieval gender in a new light. Considering works by women, like the Book of Margery Kempe, some primary texts about women, like the trial of Joan of Arc, and some scholarship about alternatives to the binary of women and men, like Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, this course will examine "woman" as a constructed category and "The Middle Ages" as one instance of the long work of making involved in issuing women into the common-sense category that they now occupy.

Full details for ENGL 6116 - Inventing Women in the Middle Ages

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 course explores the deep prehistory of the “global weirding” that some environmental critics have attributed to the present moment – looking at the strange and often unexpected versions of living together offered by early modern English literature, and captured in the idea of the oikos, in its Greek sense of “dwelling”, and its modern successors (like “ecology.”) We will discuss how various literary forms (including drama, poetry, and a range of prose genres) imagine the interactions between human, animal, plant and other bodies and their environments - - interactions marked by dependency, influence, contagion, harm, and (sometimes) pleasure. Units on environmental genres (including georgic and pastoral), embodiment and medicine (especially in the Hippocratic tradition of airs, waters, and places), weather, disaster, and contagion.

Full details for ENGL 6240 - Oecology: Bodies and Environments before the Modern

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

Full details for ENGL 6400 - Thinking Media Studies

Women writers and artists in the twentieth-century Americas invite both a chronological and a thematic focus. Often visual culture shows food and water as elements of ingestion and forced incorporation. In literature, many narrators emphasize scenes of eating and refusing to eat. And both literature and art produced during the 20th century emphasize the relation of blood to concepts of race and nation. In addition to looking at food and sexuality in visual representations of and by women, we will read critical selections on the topic. The class will include visits to the Johnson Museum. Texts will feature Edwidge Danticat, Oonya Kempadoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison. Artists include Renee Cox, Shirin Neshat, Cindy Sherman, and Kara Walker.

Full details for ENGL 6510 - 20th Century Women Writers and Artists

As Théophile Gautier said of Decadent aesthetics, “It is an ingenious, complex, learned style, full of shades and refinements of meaning, ever extending the bounds of language, borrowing from every technical vocabulary, taking colors from every palette and notes from every keyboard; a style that endeavors to express the most inexpressible thoughts, the vaguest and most fleeting contours of form, that listens, with a view to rendering them, to the subtle confidences of neurosis, to the confessions of aging lust turning into depravity, and to the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania.” "Decadent" is an enduring term of political abuse, but also defines a canonical aesthetic movement ironically fascinated throughout the past two centuries with the style of empires in decline, including ours.

Full details for ENGL 6551 - Decadence and the Modern Novel

What is the relationship between nature and empire? While the concept of the Anthropocene (the geological epoch of human-driven planetary change) has highlighted the entanglements between “human” and “natural” history, many scholars have critiqued its universalizing turn. This course asks how U.S. imperialism – as a primary motor of the capitalist and imperialist world system – constructs and operationalizes ideas of nature, natural history, natural resources, and the like. This course also asks how individuals and groups in the imperial cores and peripheries use ideas of nature to critique and resist U.S. imperialism. We will read scholarship from various disciplines (e.g. Kohout, Megan Black, Paulette Steeves, DeLoughrey, Liboiron, Marzec, Crawford) and engage with cultural productions like fiction, film, and poetry (e.g. by Asturias, Karen Tei Yamashita, Imbolo Mbue).

Full details for ENGL 6623 - Natures of U.S. Empire

This course compares narrative method and statistical modeling historically, teaching the history of predictive data techniques from the 19th century to the present while reading short-form literature - Aesop, Gogol, Dickinson - to compare the stories the numbers tell to narrative itself. The intent is to illuminate the rhetorical forms that prediction uses while studying the development of its quantitative techniques.

Full details for ENGL 6709 - Modeling between Numbers and Stories

This course will examine Giorgio Agamben’s nine-volume Homo Sacer project. Beginning with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and ending with The Use of Bodies (2015) we will follow Agamben’s thought as it addresses such topics as biopolitics, the legal order, political theology, oikonomia, work and inoperativity, form-of-life, and others. We will also read Agamben in relation to a number of his influences and interlocutors, such as Arendt, Benjamin, Benveniste, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Kantorowicz, and Schmitt.

Full details for ENGL 6739 - Agamben's Homo Sacer

Full details for ENGL 6766 - Practicum in Performance Criticism and Dramaturgy

This course examines how claims about feeling ground literary theory, with particular emphasis on the consequences of the affective turn in the early 2002s, from therapeutic criticism to the biopolitics of sentiment. How does the work of feeling register in literary form? What evidence is there that feelings are experienced, discussed, or represented in historically and culturally specific ways? When does affect theory turn to literature for evidence? How do competing conceptions of affect contribute to feminist, queer, and critical race theory? We will build genealogies from Deleuze and Sedgwick to more recent work by Terada, Ngai, Berlant, Terada, Schuller, Ahmed, and more. Literary readings will include a few novels (Charlotte Bronte, Sigrid Nunez), and long poems (Anne Carson; Claudia Rankine).

Full details for ENGL 6776 - Affect Theory

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. The descriptions can be found at 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