A study of the major poems and selected prose of John Milton, radical and conservative, heretic and defender of the faith, apologist for regicide and advocate of human dignity, committed revolutionary and Renaissance humanist, and a poet of enormous creative power and influence, whose epic, Paradise Lost, changed subsequent English Literature. Restrictions: Not open to first-year students.

Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale. Restrictions: Not open to first-years.

This course aims to identify, analyze and complicate the dominant narrative of U.S. suburbia vis-à-vis the postwar American novel. While the suburb may evoke a shared sense of tedium, U.S. fiction positions suburbia as "contested terrain," a battleground staging many of the key social, cultural and political shifts of our contemporary age.

A study of novels written in England from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen and Walter Scott (1688-1814). Emphasis on the novelists’ narrative models and choices; the course concludes by reading several novels by Austen-including one she wrote when 13 years old.

Offered as AFR 175 and ENG 236. A survey of the evolution of African American literature during the 20th century. This class builds on the foundations established in AFR 113. Writers include Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall.

This course focuses on the extraordinary burst of literary creativity that coincided with the emergence of a new American nation.

What it would be like to hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, to open one’s mind fully to the sensations and impressions of the world? The image belongs to George Eliot, who in Middlemarch suggested the humans couldn’t bear it, they would die of a sensory overload, the "roar on the other side of silence." The novelists of the generations that followed tried to live in that roar: to explore the stream of consciousness, to capture the way one makes sense of experience and order out of memory’s chaos. Readings in George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and others.

This course focuses on the legacy of confessional poetry written by women and queer, trans and nonbinary writers in the US. Frequently misread as self-indulgent, the poets under our purview use radical self-disclosure to trouble the social and legal treatment of gender and sexuality as “private” concerns unworthy of political engagement. In so doing, they resist the universalized heteronormativity of the mainstream confessional tradition and contemporary poetry writ large.