Two hundred years ago, at the age of nineteen, Mary Shelley wrote what is often called the first science fiction novel. Frankenstein not only describes fears about accelerating technology and monstrosity in the early nineteenth century; it also sets the stage for continuing discussions about gender, reproduction, race, ethics, slavery, science, artificial intelligence, language, and disability.

(Offered as SWAG 331 and ENGL 319) What is the novel? How do we know when a work of literature qualifies as a novel? In this course we will study the postcolonial novel which explodes the certainties of the European novel. Written in the aftermath of empire, these novels question race, class, gender and empire in their subject matter and narrative form. We will consider fiction from South Asia, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. Novels include South African writer J.M.

(Offered as ENGL 317 and BLST 317 [CLA]) A survey of the work of Anglophone Caribbean poets, alongside readings about the political, cultural and aesthetic traditions that have influenced their work. Readings will include longer cycles of poems by Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite; dialect and neoclassical poetry from the colonial period; and more recent poetry by women writers and performance (“dub”) poets.

Fall semester. Professor Cobham-Sander.

(Offered as RUSS 225 and ENGL 315) This course undertakes a sustained examination of the works of Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). Drawing on the literary masterpieces of Nabokov’s Russian and English periods, we seek to gain a critical appreciation of his literary art and the cultural and aesthetic contexts from which they emerged.

Readings and discussions centering on the work of Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. Some attention also to A.E. Housman, Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

Fall semester. Professor Emeritus Pritchard.

(Offered as ENGL 300 and SWAG 302) [Before 1800] The seventeenth century was a time of rapid and profound political, religious, and social change in England. Civil wars saw the execution of a divinely-sanctioned monarch; new lands were colonized; new forms of science changed the way the universe was perceived; religious and social shifts reframed the definition of marriage. Through it all, women wrote, and they increasingly wrote for audiences outside their immediate familial circle.

Why does it seem natural to read ourselves and other people in the same way that we read books? This course will introduce students to psychoanalytic thought and psychoanalytic literary interpretation. Freud famously reads Jensen’s short story Gradiva as a case history, but we will seek out ways of reading literature and psychoanalysis together that go beyond diagnosing characters or authors. How is psychoanalytic theory itself literary? How can it help to open up, rather than reduce, our reading experience?

(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210) An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of a few critical and descriptive terms, together with a selection of various films (classic and contemporary, foreign and American) for illustration and discussion. The terms for discussion will include, among others: mise-en-scène, montage, realism, visual pleasure, and the avant-garde. Two class meetings and one screening per week.

Limited to 35 students. Fall semester. Professor Guilford.

(Offered as ENGL 274 and AMST 274) In 2013, Amherst College acquired one of the most comprehensive collections of Native American writing in the world–nearly 1,500 books ranging from contemporary fiction and poetry to sermons, political tracts, and tribal histories from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through this course, we will actively engage the literature of this collection, researching Native American intellectual traditions, regional contexts, political debates, creative adaptation, and movements toward decolonization.

(Offered as ENGL 258 and BLST 213 [D]) The very idea of the future presents a particular challenge when thinking about Black populations characterized by multiple overlapping experiences of displacement, including displacements in space—diaspora, migration, enslavement—and displacements in time—the middle passage as temporal fracture but also as beginning, the materiality of African pasts. How have futures been conceptualized by Black diasporic communities? What does it mean to transform heavy presents and pasts into visions for better, more livable worlds?