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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 1100 - How Reading Changes Your Life

In 2001, Henry Louis Gates Jr. purchased an unseen manuscript at auction and discovered what may be the first novel written by an African American woman: The Bondswoman's Narrative, dating to the 1850s. The novel—possibly written by an enslaved woman named Hannah Crafts—draws directly from canonical Victorian fiction, particularly Dickens' Bleak House and Brontë's Jane Eyre. What was a Black woman in antebellum America reading, and how did she reimagine these texts? The manuscript itself is incomplete, with gaps and unfinished sections: what can other nineteenth-century unfinished novels, like Austen's Sanditon, teach us about Crafts' fragmentary narrative? This one-credit course investigates authorship, transatlantic literary influence, textual recovery, and the aesthetics of unfinishedness.

Full details for ENGL 1103 - The Bondswoman's Narrative: America's First Black Woman Novelist & Her Victorian Sources

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

In The Personal Essay, our topics are autobiographical in their origins; we write from personal experience, to think about it and to articulate it, in a style useful in all modes of college-admission and college-work. Our writing practice is both creative and analytical. We discover how writers use drafting and revision as a process of thinking, and in weekly workshops we practice the kind of revision that can make us more independent as writers and more capable of giving helpful suggestions to friends who are also writers. The most important texts for the course are the essays of students enrolled in it; but we also read and discuss personal memoirs. This seminar offers students from diverse backgrounds a forum in which to move beyond accustomed boundaries, finding agency not only through use of the first-person voice but through increased confidence in their abilities as writers.

Full details for ENGL 1132 - FWS:The Personal Essay

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

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

Full details for ENGL 1270 - FWS: Writing About Literature

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, new technologies have continuously — sometimes explosively — transformed our senses of selfhood and identity, privacy and community, imagination and the real. From the telephone to the LLM, these technologies have both transmuted and fed upon our speech, writing, and language. But, as this survey of modern literatures in English will explore, writing has also itself been 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 both 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 telegraph to the television, from notebooks to typewriters, radio to computers. (ENGL-PST)

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

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

Full details for ENGL 2035 - Science Fiction

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

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

The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musical-and how in turn musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST, MUSIC-HC, PMA-HTC)

Full details for ENGL 2150 - The American Musical

Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 2400 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature

While the march toward the Civil War centers race in our recollection of the nineteenth century, the question of slavery’s abolition was deeply intertwined with issues of gender and citizenship. One challenge of narrating these interwoven movements is accounting for the embodied intersection of these debates: Black women. This introductory course approaches the complexities of antebellum America through 5 prominent figures of the period bearing the same first name—Harriet Robinson Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson. Read together, these women illuminate the nuances of racialized and gendered belonging in the United States. Their literary and historical traces also invite engagements with Black feminist reading and archival praxes.

Full details for ENGL 2505 - Reading Harriet: An Introduction to Race, Gender, and Belonging in the Antebellum United States

“Anglophone” literature refers to literature written in English, usually British literature and literature by authors from or living in countries where English was originally a language of colonization. This course will focus on contemporary Anglophone prose—novels, short short stories, personal essays— from a variety of national locations. Authors will include some of the following: Chimamanda Adichie (Nigeria/United States) Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe); Anita Desai (India); Bernardine Evaristo (England); Kazuo Ishiguro (England); Eimear McBride (Ireland); Paul Murray (Ireland); Arundahti Roy (India); Zadie Smith (England/United States); Douglas Stewart (Scotland). The course will also introduce historical contexts and critical frameworks to consider how Anglophone literatures enter, alter, and create literary traditions.

Full details for ENGL 2520 - Contemporary Anglophone Literature

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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 2600 - Introduction to Native American Literature

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

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

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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 2690 - American Poetry Since 1850

What counts as African literature? This course examines the long and varied history of literature from the world’s largest continent, including early Afro-Arab poetry, oral epics of the Malian Empire, novels and plays of twentieth-century decolonization, and contemporary Afrofuturist film and fiction. We’ll also consider the place of narratives of enslavement and more recent diasporic texts. Along the way, we’ll discuss some of the big debates that have divided African writers: Must one write in English? Should African literature be political? Is all African literature necessarily "postcolonial”? Students will leave the course with an understanding of how African literature speaks to both the continent and the world in ways that can help us to understand our present.

Full details for ENGL 2700 - What is African 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. (MUSIC-HC)

Full details for ENGL 2703 - Thinking Media

This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the The Story of Sinuhe and The Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the Travels of Ibn Battuta, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, and The Arabian Nights. We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

Full details for ENGL 2754 - Wondrous Literatures of the Near East

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

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. (ARKEO-COS)

Full details for ENGL 2950 - Introduction to Humanities

This course will explore how in the body of world literature, film and music humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning. Spanning from ancient epic through colonial narratives to twentieth century works and 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 and include authors such as St John of Patmos, Messiaen, Columbus, Beckett, Gibson, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Liu.

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

In his work "Black Reconstruction in America," Du Bois glosses over a key moment in American revolutionary thinking. Senator Wade of Ohio, among three Whig politicians impatient with Abraham Lincoln's acccommodationism in relation to the defeated South, proposes a certain radical policy. That is, the newly liberated slaves must be willing to act their former oppressors. Du Bois, in cursory parliamentary fashion, makes mention of Wade's radicalism but never engages it. However, in his biography of John Brown, we find Du Bois' thinking of a piece with Wade's. This course will chart the unfolding of Du Bois's critique: from his non-engagement to what we might take to be an almost full embrace of Wade's proposal through the radical actions of John Brown.

Full details for ENGL 3029 - Revolutionary John Brown: As Figured by W.E.B. Du Bois

What symbolic forms might be adequate to phenomena of such inhuman scale as the sixth extinction or the catastrophic climate change of the Anthropocene? Revisiting important literary theoretical discourses on the epic and the realist novel through the lens of Amitav Ghosh’s argument that the realist novel actively occludes the realities of its time and that its form forecloses the non-human, this course will investigate the affordances of epic form, myth and fable for modes of apprehending and representating the inhuman. Materials will range from ancient and medieval epic to contemporary novels, films and anime with special attention to the challenging work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris. Authors may include Homer, Dante, Han Kang, Flaubert, Miyazaki, Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Benh Zeitlin and Wilson Harris.

Full details for ENGL 3075 - Epic Form and the Inhuman

An introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and the Icelandic family saga-the native heroic literary genre of Icelandic tradition. Texts will vary but will normally include the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, Hrafnkels Saga, Njals Saga, Laxdaela Saga, and Grettirs Saga. All readings will be in translation. (ENGL-PRE)

Full details for ENGL 3080 - Icelandic Family Sagas

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. (ENGL-PRE)

Full details for ENGL 3120 - Beowulf

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

Full details for ENGL 3390 - Jane Austen

?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. (ENGL-PST)

Full details for ENGL 3550 - Decadence

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.

Full details for ENGL 3565 - Black Ecoliterature

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

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

Crisis is a rupture, break or perceivable shift in what is ‘normal’. Terms like the ‘Permacrisis’ or the ‘crisis ordinary’ attempt to explain our global heightened awareness about impending danger. In this class we will read widely across the 20th and 21st centuries in a variety of genres from fiction to poetry to drama. Topics will vary but may include literary responses to political, social, psychological, theological or climate crisis, aesthetic responses to moral or societal panic, war and migration/trauma, disease, as well as any links between identity and crisis in literature and the visual (photography, film, fine art). We will consider how the framing of crisis as an affective moment or event shapes how we think about chronologies of literary response and its social uses.

Full details for ENGL 3771 - Contemporary Literature and Crisis

Disinformation, gag laws, de-platforming, violent hate speech, recommendation algorithms, chatbots, image generators. This course will help us make sense of our increasingly volatile public sphere by surveying the history of free speech and censorship from the print revolution to the information age. In democratic societies, freedom of expression is both a cultural value and protected right; yet governments routinely regulate speech through a variety of mechanisms: from direct censorship, to licensing and copyright laws, to high court decisions about what qualifies as speech. We'll track the categories of dangerous speech-blasphemy, pornography, treason, libel-as they've changed over time. And we'll also consider forms censorship that protect freedoms and ensure civil discourse, such as banning racial stereotyping or genocide denial.

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

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

This popular course was introduced here at Cornell a decade ago. This year will mark the third time that we’ve been able to offer it, in light of all the moving parts and unique components that pulling it off requires. Beyoncé’s recent albums and related tours, namely Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, have taken her iconicity to new heights evidenced in contexts from the 2024 Olympics to advertisements for Levi’s Jeans. Her song “Freedom” from her Lemonade album was the anthem for the 2024 presidential campaign of Vice President of Kamala Harris. As a musical artist, Beyoncé emerged at the forefront of activism during the past decade, and helped to advocate for a more inclusive vision of the U.S. as a nation, while drawing attention to the long-overlooked contributions of African Americans to the genre of country music. All of these dimensions of her artistry and many more are important to study in order to understand her national and global impact. In this course, we examine her contributions, along with various figures connected to her, including her closest family. Beyoncé’s trajectory from Houston, Texas as a member of the group Destiny's Child to international fame and superstardom and a successful career as a solo singer, actress, clothing designer and entrepreneur holds important implications for critical dialogues on the U.S. South and national femininity. We will carefully trace Beyoncé's journey to global fame and iconicity and the roles of the music business, social media and technology, fashion, and film in her development.

Full details for ENGL 3950 - Beyoncé Nation: The Decennium

Literary texts and written constitutions do not appear to have much in common. Yet there is a long tradition that has seen poetic and imaginative invention as crucial to social and political organization, from the mythic figures of Orpheus and Amphion whose verses could tame beasts and build cities, to the role of theater in Athenian democracy, to the epic poems that voice the authority of states and societies. As Percy Shelley wrote in A Defense of Poetry, poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In this course, we will study works that expressly present themselves as making or constituting the polity to better understand how literature patterns out popular sovereignty and limited authority.

Full details for ENGL 4230 - Literature and Constitutionalism

In the Victorian period (1837-1901), many genres of English-language fiction—the domestic novel, the bildungsroman, science fiction, detective fiction—attained their familiar and still flourishing forms. Neo-Victorian authors time-travel back to inhabit Victorian characters, settings, and themes. Neo-Victorian practices including reimagining a classic Victorian novel from the point of view of a marginalized character; populating Victorian settings with new protagonists with identities (working-class, queer, subaltern or minoritized) generally stigmatized or minimized in the period’s literature; and adapting Victorian sources to contemporary media. Reading both Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, we will explore what is at stake in these revisions and adaptations and what critical frameworks can help us interpret their effects. Students will have an opportunity to try their hands at their own Neo-Victorian adaptation.

Full details for ENGL 4450 - Literary Time-Travel: Victorian & Neo-Victorian Literature

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. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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

Forced or chosen, migration exacts complex costs. How have writers from across the globe adopted and changed the novel -- a form associate with rise of imperialism -- to tell stories about migration and exile? How do these aesthetic challenges also dovetail with or diverge from the aesthetics of detention spaces and borders? Is there a useful aesthetic theory or creative practice for stories about migration when aesthetics have been closely tied to power? How do affective structures lean on or escape aesthetic habits to make new meaning, tell new stories that don’t simply end in acculturation or assimilation? We will engage with these questions by studying novels, art, and memoirs alongside recent theories of aesthetics and affect.

Full details for ENGL 4640 - Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction on the Move

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 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

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

Full details for ENGL 6050 - Archives and Artifacts

Beowulf 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

Literary texts and written constitutions do not appear to have much in common. Yet there is a long tradition that has seen poetic and imaginative invention as crucial to social and political organization, from the mythic figures of Orpheus and Amphion whose verses could tame beasts and build cities, to the role of theater in Athenian democracy, to the epic poems that voice the authority of states and societies. As Percy Shelley wrote in A Defense of Poetry, poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In this course, we will study works that expressly present themselves as making or constituting the polity to better understand how literature patterns out popular sovereignty and limited authority.

Full details for ENGL 6230 - Literature and Constitutionalism

In the Victorian period (1837-1901), many genres of English-language fiction—the domestic novel, the bildungsroman, science fiction, detective fiction—attained their familiar and still flourishing forms. Neo-Victorian authors time-travel back to inhabit Victorian characters, settings, and themes. Neo-Victorian practices including reimagining a classic Victorian novel from the point of view of a marginalized character; populating Victorian settings with new protagonists with identities (working-class, queer, subaltern or minoritized) generally stigmatized or minimized in the period’s literature; and adapting Victorian sources to contemporary media. Reading both Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, we will explore what is at stake in these revisions and adaptations and what critical frameworks can help us interpret their effects. Students will have an opportunity to try their hands at their own Neo-Victorian adaptation.

Full details for ENGL 6450 - Literary Time-Travel: Victorian & Neo-Victorian Literature

This course will explore postwar US poetry through the lens of what might be called micro-periodization. Taking the decade as a privileged frame of reference, we’ll ask what recognizable shifts in style, institutional placement, and cultural value occur as we move from the 50s to the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. These temporal modulations will serve as an alternative to the spatial demarcations that have typically shaped accounts of postwar poetry—e.g., by region, school, movement, etc. We’ll consider, for example, how the loosely paratactic style that emerges in the 50s (Ginsberg, Lowell, Bishop) gives way in the 60s to a starker lyric mode that blends epiphany and epigram (Merwin, Wright, Creeley), yielding in turn to a more discursive style in the 70s (Ammons, Ashbery, Rich).

Full details for ENGL 6631 - American Poetry, 1950-2000

Forced or chosen, migration exacts complex costs. How have writers from across the globe adopted and changed the novel -- a form associate with rise of imperialism -- to tell stories about migration and exile? How do these aesthetic challenges also dovetail with or diverge from the aesthetics of detention spaces and borders? Is there a useful aesthetic theory or creative practice for stories about migration when aesthetics have been closely tied to power? How do affective structures lean on or escape aesthetic habits to make new meaning, tell new stories that don’t simply end in acculturation or assimilation? We will engage with these questions by studying novels, art, and memoirs alongside recent theories of aesthetics and affect.

Full details for ENGL 6640 - Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction on the Move

The recent prominence of “translation studies” as a field of inquiry has brought to the fore the way the issues of translation touch both directly and obliquely on a number of key questions in contemporary literary studies and theory: the nature of linguistic meaning and hermeneutic practices, the problems and prospects of a world literature, the mechanics of historical transmission and formation of literary traditions, to name just a few. This course will examine the theory and (to a lesser extent) practice of translation, with readings of theoretical and literary texts ranging from the ancient to the contemporary. Note that though it may come in handy, fluency in a foreign language is not required to take this course.

Full details for ENGL 6793 - Genres of Translation

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