Topics course. A close reading of Chaucer's story of love and betrayal in the time of the Trojan War. Cultural contexts include Boethius's Consolation, Chaucer's Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and the conception of late medieval London as a "new Troy." Attention to the Troilus tradition, including Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, Shakespeare's play and Burne-Jones's cycle of illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer. No prior experience with Chaucer's English required.

In this course, we explore the cultural and literary work of "representing women in the Renaissance" through the primary lens of a striking range of works by women authors in the period.

What do we do when we read literature? Does the meaning of a text depend on the author's intention? Or on how readers read? What counts as a valid interpretation? Who decides? How do some texts get canonized and others forgotten? How does literature function in culture and society? How do changing understandings of language, the unconscious, class, gender, race, history or sexuality affect how we read? "Theory" is "thinking about thinking," questioning common sense, critically examining the categories we use to approach literature or any discursive text.

The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past 100 years has been recognized as forming a coherent tradition. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text central or marginal to the tradition? Writers to be studied include Maxine Hong Kingston, Sui Sin Far, Mitsuye Yamada, M. Evelina Galang, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Marilyn Chin, Paisley Rekdal, Lynda Barry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee and Ruth Ozeki.

A study of the major poems and selected prose of John Milton, radical and conservative, heretic and defender of the faith, apologist for patriarchy and advocate of human dignity, the last great Renaissance humanist, a poet of enormous creative power and influence. Not open to first-year students.

Representative works of recent fiction, chosen from across the English-speaking world with an eye to suggesting the range, variety and possibilities of the contemporary novel. Readings vary from year to year, but likely suspects include Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Pat Barker, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Don DeLillo, Peter Carey and Cormac McCarthy, along with a selection of younger figures.

A study of American narratives, from a variety of ethnic traditions and historical eras, that explore the forms of movement -- immigration, migration, boundary crossing -- so characteristic of American life. Emphasis on each author's treatment of the complex encounter between new or marginalized Americans and an established culture, and on definitions or interrogations of what it might mean to be or become "American."

The language of the ancient Goths was first recorded in the fourth century CE, our best resource for reconstructing the prehistory of Old English to which it is closely related.

Topics course.

Topics course. Same as AAS 202. In this class, we study the ways that black essayists negotiate ideas about race through notions of love: what does it mean to figure one's humanity through the miasma of race; and how is love as a concept and the form of the essay relevant to this figuring? Here, we think race intersectionally, as a term that is only meaningful if one notices its invocation of gender, class, sexuality.