A study of the major poems and selected prose of John Milton, radical and conservative, heretic and defender of the faith, apologist for regicide and advocate of human dignity, committed revolutionary andRenaissance humanist, and a poet of enormous creative power and influence, whose epic, Paradise Lost, changed subsequent English Literature. Not open to first-year students.

In sections limited to 15 students each, this course primarily provides systematic instruction and practice in reading and writing academic prose, with emphasis on argumentation. The course also provides instruction and practice in conducting research and in public speaking. Particular sections of this course are designed to support nonnative speakers and bilinguals, who are strongly encouraged to consider those sections. Priority is given to incoming students in the fall-semester sections. Course may be repeated for credit with another instructor: We live in a culture of performance.

In sections limited to 15 students each, this course primarily provides systematic instruction and practice in reading and writing academic prose, with emphasis on argumentation. The course also provides instruction and practice in conducting research and in public speaking. Particular sections of this course are designed to support nonnative speakers and bilinguals, who are strongly encouraged to consider those sections. Priority is given to incoming students in the fall-semester sections.

Topics course: This seminar explores the significance of women’s voices in Othello, King Lear and The Tempest, viewed in conjunction with reimaginings of these plays by women playwrights, producers, and directors, as well as women poets and novelists. The course explores how women artists have engaged with and transformed Shakespeare’s women at different cultural moments, exploring questions of adaptive appropriation across global and temporal boundaries as well as race and gender.

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.

: This seminar focuses on the visual and verbal work of poet and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) who, though unrecognized in his own time, is today hailed as a prophet, genius and revolutionary. We investigate the tensions in Blake's writings between word and image, myth and history, and knowledge and hypocrisy. Students research the scientific, political, aesthetic and social histories of Britain at the turn of the 19th century to understand both his trenchant critique of the world in which he lived and his utopian, often apocalyptic and revolutionary dreams of a different future.

Same as ENG 293. Will books as material objects disappear in your lifetime? Or will the book, a remarkably long-lived piece of communication technology, continue to flourish and develop alongside its electronic counterparts? This course surveys theartistry andhistory of books from the ancient world through medieval manuscripts, hand press books, and machine press books to the digital media of today. We discover how books were made, read, circulated and used in different eras, and explore the role they have played over time in social, political, scientific and cultural change.

Same as ARH 247. Will books as material objects disappear in your lifetime? Or will the book, a remarkably long-lived piece of communication technology, continue to flourish and develop alongside its electronic counterparts? This course surveys the artistry and history of books from the ancient world through medieval manuscripts, hand press books, and machine press books to the digital media of today. We discover how books were made, read, circulated and used in different eras, and explore the role they have played over time in social, political, scientific and cultural change.

19th-century revivals and transformations of medieval literature, arts and social institutions; the remaking of the Middle Ages in the image of Victorian desires and aspirations. Arthurian legend in medieval and 19th-century England, the Gothic revival in British art and architecture, the cult of Chaucer, controversies over women’s education, and the idealization of medieval communities in Victorian social theory.

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.