We have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, characterized by the accelerating impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems. All over the globe, humans have transformed the environment and have sometimes created catastrophic dynamics within social-ecological systems. Scientists have studied these phenomena for decades, alerting both the general public and policy-makers of the consequences of our actions. However, despite convincing evidence of environmental degradation, humans continue to radically transform their environment.

Visiting the colonial West Indies to the modern-day Caribbean, U.S., Canada, U.K., and France, this seminar analyzes the literatures of the Black Atlantic and the development of Black literary and intellectual history from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Some key theoretical frameworks, which will help inform our study of literature emerging from the Black Atlantic, include diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Readings include slave narratives, poetry, novels, films, critical essays, and theory. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only.

A Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing. You hear it all the time: The humanities are in crisis! Literature is in crisis! English is in crisis! If the peculiar pleasures and potentials of literary study are to become known so that English might be valued rather than derided, our defenses are going to have to go public, to reach broader non-specialist and non-academic audiences. This seminar will help you to develop skills for communicating to the public about the specific values of literature, literary analysis and scholarship, English, and the humanities. Enrollment limited to 12.

Offered as PYX 301 and ENG 301. Conceived as the culmination of an undergraduate poet’s work, this course features a rigorous immersion in creative generation and revision. Student poets write a chapbook manuscript with thematic and/or stylistic cohesion (rather than disparate poems, as in prior workshop settings). For Poetry concentrators, this course counts as the required Capstone; for English majors in the Creative Writing track, the course counts as an advanced workshop, and may count toward the fulfillment of the "capstone experience" requirement.

We will address the challenges of diversifying and democratizing the public environment for creative work, and strategies used by authors and publishers to bring creative work forward, and to readers, in challenging times. Literary ethics, cultural and class identities, literary and societal taboos, and historical and current issues of access will be core concepts discussed in the workshop. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. (E)

Offered as AFR 245 and ENG 282. A study of one of the first cohesive cultural movements in Afican-American history. This class focuses on developments in politics, and civil rights (NAACP, Urban League, UNIA), creative arts (poetry, prose, painting, sculpture) and urban sociology (modernity, the rise of cities). Writers include Zora Neale Hurston, David Levering Lewis, Gloria Hull, Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen among others. Enrollment limited to 40.

Romantic writers were obsessed with uncertainty, ignorance, and the irrational, unthinking mind. Concerned with the unusual ideas that surface when we are sleeping or spaced out, absorbed or intoxicated, Romanticism embraced reason’s alternatives: forgetting, fragmentation, stupidity, and spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. From Wordsworth’s suggestion that children are wiser than adults to Keats’s claim that great writers are capable of remaining uncertain without reaching for fact or reason, Romantic poets and novelists suggested that we have something to learn from not thinking.

Offered as GER 271 and ENG 271. This course explores how artists and thinkers over the centuries have grappled with the presence of evil--how to account for its perpetual recurrence, its ominous power, its mysterious allure. Standing at the junction of literature, philosophy, and religion, the notion of evil reveals much about the development of the autonomous individual, the intersection of morality, freedom and identity, and the confrontation of literary and historical evil. Readings include literary works from Milton, Goethe, Blake, Kleist, E.T.A.

Divine and erotic love are not polar opposites. They are intertwined in time and space by the mind of the poet. In exploring the dimensions of varieties of human love, lyric poets of the seventeenth century create new worlds where their desires and devotion, their wit and their invention can flourish. We will focus on the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Marvell, Lady Mary Wroth, Emilia Lanier.