(Offered as ENGL 350 and AMST 350.)  [before 1800]  American Origins is a course in Early American literature and history.  It explores when and how this country began.  We readily forget that it only became the “United States” in 1789.  Before that and from early in the European conquests, it was “the (Spanish, or French, or English, or Dutch) colonies,” or “America” and thus but a part of European settlements in both the Southern and the Northern hemispheres.  It was also a place known as “Turtle Island,” with i

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.

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

(Offered as ENGL 318 and BLST 362 [A/CLA].) The course will concentrate on Caribbean authors. It explores the process of self-definition in literary works from Africa and the Caribbean that are built around child protagonists. We will examine the authors’ various methods of ordering experience through the choice of literary form and narrative technique, as well as the child/author’s perception of his or her society. French texts will be read in translation.

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.  Visiting 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.

(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.

How do long poems come together–and hold together?  Can they maintain a lyric intensity, or do they inevitably give way to the looser energies of narrative or extended meditation?  We will read works in many forms–including heroic couplets, ballad stanzas, and free verse–by poets from the eighteenth century to the present, including Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, and Paul Muldoon.

Fall semester.  Writer-in-Residence Hall.

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.  Spring semester:  Professors Nelson and Worsley.