[before 1800]  What is “English Literature,” and how does one construct its history?  What counts as “England” (especially in relation to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and to ancient Greece and Rome)? What is the relationship between histories of literature and political, social, religious and intellectual histories? What is the role of gender in the making of literature, and the making of its histories?

(Offered as ENGL 153 and SWAG 112.)  This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turning of the twentieth century.  Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.”  Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration,

With a focus on the skills of close reading and analytical writing, we will look at the ways in which writers imagine illness, how they try to make meaning out of illness, and how they use illness to explore other aspects of experience.  This is not a course on the history of illness or the social construction of disease.  We will discuss not only what writers say about illness but also how they say it: with what language and in what form they speak the experience of bodily and mental suffering.  Readings may include drama by Sophocles, Molière and Margaret Edson; poet

Students, as part of the work of the course, each week will tutor or lead discussions among a small group of students at Holyoke High School. The readings for the course will be essays, poems, autobiographies, and stories in which education and teaching figure centrally. Among these will be materials that focus directly on Holyoke and on one or another of the ethnic groups which have shaped its history. Students will write weekly and variously: critical essays, journal entries, ethnographies, etc.

In 1852, Karl Marx observed that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”  Modernism–the aesthetic response to the experience of modernity–can be understood as a way to cast off that nightmare through the revolutionary force of the new.  In this course, arranged around thematic clusters such as The City, Alienation, Primitivism, The New Woman, War, Speed, and Consciousness, we will range widely through European and Anglo-American writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers from the late nineteenth through

(Offered as ENGL 117 and EUST 117.)  [before 1800]  Knights, monsters, quests, and true love:  these are the things we associate with King Arthur and tales of his court. Why has Arthurian literature proved so enchanting to centuries of  poets, novelists, and recently, filmmakers?  In this introductory English course, we will read and watch Arthurian legends from Chaucer to Monty Python, examining the ways in which they have been represented in different eras.

(Offered as ENGL 112 and SWAG 106.)  This course will examine the phenomenon of “realism” in a variety of artistic media.

Using a variety of texts–novels, essays, short stories–this course will work to develop the reading and writing of difficult prose, paying particular attention to the kinds of evidence and authority, logic and structure that produce strong  arguments.  The authors we study may include Peter Singer, Aravind Adiga, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Charles Johnson, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, William Carlos Williams.  This is an intensive writing course.  Frequent short papers will be assigned.

Using a variety of texts–novels, essays, short stories–this course will work to develop the reading and writing of difficult prose, paying particular attention to the kinds of evidence and authority, logic and structure that produce strong  arguments.  The authors we study may include Peter Singer, Aravind Adiga, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Charles Johnson, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, William Carlos Williams.  This is an intensive writing course.  Frequent short papers will be assigned.

Why study literature?  In many contexts, including the contexts of most other academic disciplines, one reads in order to extract the gist of a text. By studying literature, we enable ourselves to do much more than that. Studying literature makes it possible to recover a relationship to language that we all once had, in which words and their interrelationships were new, strange, and rich with possibility.