Can reading poetry change our understanding of our environment?  How might the way we perceive nature be conditioned by the ways in which writers have imagined it?  In turn, how might the way we perceive our own imaginations be conditioned by ideas about the natural world?  Although “nature” might seem like a universal and unchanging concept, British Romantic writers did much to invent our modern perception of it.  This course questions what “nature” might mean, and how it developed alongside changing ideas about the imagination.

[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.  This course will be offered only in the fall semester in 2016-17.

Limited to 50 students.  Fall semester.  Visiting Professor Berek.

(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.

(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.

This course examines how contemporary global novels employ animals to explore the limits of humanity and human community.  As globalization creates intersecting networks of production and communication across borders, many recent novelists foreground human-animal relations alongside their depictions of contemporary global reality.  Why should they choose to include animals in their visions of a global society?  What may be the connection between the lives of animals and globalization?  Reading a selection of philosophical and theoretical texts alongside contemporary Angl

This will be an historical survey, from the nineteenth century to the present, of poetry written by gay men and lesbians, both in and out of the closet.

Fall semester.  Writer-in-Residence Hall.

It’s possible to imagine people who have not yet suffered, who have not yet had a peculiarly intense and sustained experience of physical or psychic pain.  Those imaginary people are, however, vulnerable to future suffering.  Even more importantly, they live in a world in which many others suffer, so many that a refusal to attend to suffering amounts to a refusal of a meaningfully relational existence.  Thinking and feeling in response to suffering is, accordingly, an inescapable aspect of what Henri Bergson describes as “a really living life.”  But