[before 1800]  A study of six classic writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:  Ben Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Samuel Johnson.  Among the readings are:  Jonson, poems and Volpone; Milton, Comus, “Lycidas” and Paradise Lost; Dryden, poems and critical prose; Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” Essay on Man, The Dunciad; Swift, Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels, poems; Johnson, poems, Rasselas, Prefaces to Shakespeare and to the Dictionary, p

[before 1800]  What is medieval?  Most people learn very little about the foggy period from 500-1500 that lies between the end of the Classical era and the start of the Renaissance.  What we do learn usually consists of stereotypes.  Such stereotypes include (in no particular order):  jousting, chivalry, repression of women, religious fervor, medical ignorance, lice, Crusades, King Arthur, economic injustice, knights, ladies, and plague.  How are these stereotypes produced and reinforced online?  What is their relationship to historical “fact”?

(Offered as EUST 303 and ENGL 320) Acts of translation underwrite many kinds of cultural production, often invisibly. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, engaged with black internationalism through bilingualism and translation, as Brent Edwards has reminded us. In this course we will study literary translation as a creative practice involved in the making of subjects and cultures. We will read key statements about translation by theorists and translators, such as Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, Lawrence Venuti, Peter Cole and Gayatri Spivak.

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 both psychoanalytic theory and literary interpretation, asking about their similarities as well as their dissonance.  Why do novels of development and case-studies resemble one another?  What can the Freudian understanding of the structure of the psyche teach us about the structure of narrative?  And what do “illnesses” like hysteria and paranoia have in common with everyday acts of meaning-making and with the way we read lit

(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 278 and BLST 212 [A])  This course will examine how African writers incorporate digital technologies into their work when they publish traditional print texts, experiment with digital formats, or use the internet to redefine their relationship to local and international audiences. We will reflect on how words and values shift in response to new forms of mediation; on the limits these forms place on the bodies they represent, and on the protections they occasionally offer.

No one course could begin to do justice to this title. Over 400 different indigenous cultures inhabited the territory for some 20,000 years before European conquest began. Africans from all of West Africa and smaller numbers from the whole continent arrived with the Spaniards and millions as slaves for English settlers. Immigrants from every European country came in the nineteenth century. Asia began to send its people as early as the 1840s.

An introduction to the study of the novel, through the exploration of a variety of critical terms (plot, character, point of view, tone, realism, identification, genre fiction, the book) and methodologies (structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic).  We will draw on a selection of novels in English to illustrate and complicate those terms; possible authors include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Emma Donoghue, David Foster Wallace, Monique Truong, Jennifer Egan.

A first course in the critical reading of selected English-language poets, which gives students exposure to significant poets, poetic styles, and literary and cultural contexts for poetry from across the tradition.  Attention will be given to prosody and poetic forms, and to different ways of reading poems.

Limited to 35 students.  Fall semester.  Professor Sofield.

[Before 1800]  Readings in the comedies, histories, and tragedies, with attention to their poetic language, dramatic structure, and power in performance.  Texts and topics will vary by instructor. 

Limited to 50 students. Fall semester: Professor Grobe.  Spring semester: Professor Bosman.