Arthurian legend conjures enduring stereotypes of chivalry and romantic love, but how do we go about situating medieval romance in literary history? Where does it come from, why was it written, who read it, and how did it change over time? In this course, students will learn about romance's historical and social contexts, its form, tropes, and imagery. We will think about romance's contemplation of justice, loyalty, subjectivity, love, and shame, especially as this body of literature grapples with the conflicts that arise between the mortal and divine.

This course will examine the major African American writers of the twentieth century, beginning with the poetry and prose of Paul Laurence Dunbar and ending with the fiction of Toni Morrison, John Wideman, and the poetry of Yusef Koumanyaka, Rita Dove, and others. We will discuss the strategies involved in the creation of a 'black voice' and its relationship to Anglo-American literature.

This workshop is for students seriously engaged in writing short stories. Students will refine their technical skills and work on the subtleties of style. Extensive readings are required.

A workshop focusing on writing for children at different age levels. Students will work on a variety of projects in fiction and nonfiction, and experiment with different styles, forms, and approaches. Weekly writing and editing assignments and selected readings of children's literature are required. The course includes guest lectures (which are open to the campus) and field trips.

An introduction to the epic poem Beowulf in its original language and in translation. Written between c. 750 and c.1000 CE, Beowulf is the chief poetic achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, a work of stunning artistry, complex structure, and ancient folk wisdom. Beowulf has inspired J. R. R. Tolkien and Seamus Heaney as well as numerous authors and translators today. Reading the poem closely, we will put it into its historical and literary contexts, imagining Anglo-Saxon readers as well as modern ones. A knowledge of the Old English language is preferred but not required.

Known as a storyteller par excellence, Chaucer was also a famous reader of classical epic, romance, and philosophy. This research seminar will give students the opportunity to read the Canterbury Tales in light of the work's cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Throughout the semester, students will engage with Chaucer's tales and his favorite sources to examine and discuss his representations of gender and class, his perspectives on religious authority, his use of the English vernacular, and his commitment to poetry.

We will read plays by Shakespeare, watch films based on those plays, and study the plays, the films, and the plays-as-films. 'Shakespeare' comes first, of course, both historically and as the source/inspiration for the films. Yet each film has its own existence, to be understood not just as an 'adaptation,' but also as the product of linked artistic, technical, and economic choices.

This course focuses on the various forms the story of the grail takes in Arthurian legends from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries in the literature of England, France, and Europe. Centered in medieval English versions of the Arthurian myth, the course considers the political and cultural forces that helped shape the grail legend after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, and over the course of the later Middle Ages, into the twentieth century. Readings from Malory, Tennyson and contemporary fiction as well as chronicles and romances.

When George Eliot's first stories were published, Charles Dickens wrote, 'The exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humor and the pathos of these stories, I have never seen the like of.' Decades later, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.' In her letters, Eliot said she wanted to change what the novel could do. Her novels are concerned with the mysterious and mundane, with the force of culture and history, and with the reverberations that move through the world from individual to individual.

A study of the modernist movement in Britain in the early twentieth century, with the focus on the fiction and nonfiction writings of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Readings will include Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love; Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years. Readings will also include critical essays by each author as well as brief critical biographies and selected secondary criticism.