English BA

In this course, students survey important and influential texts of the last two centuries. Emphasis is placed on literary history and the development of the English language as the vehicle of literary expression. Attention is also given to literary analysis, and to the application of various interpretive approaches.

Full course description for English Literature: 1800-Present

In this course, students survey important and influential texts of the medieval, Renaissance and early modern periods. Emphasis is placed on literary history and the development of the English language as the vehicle of literary expression. Attention is also given to literary analysis and to the application of various interpretive approaches.

Full course description for English Literature: Beginnings-1800

This course takes a critical and historical approach to literature in English by women, looking at the emergence of female literary voices and exploring the contexts in which their works were written. Some sections of the course may focus on particular traditions within the range of literature written by women.

Full course description for Women Writers

This course surveys how works of American literature and film assert, create, examine, reinforce, privilege, and/or question the construction of racialized and gendered narratives surrounding identity. Students discuss ways that fiction, drama, poetry, popular music, and film engage with the issues of race, racism, and gender. In addition, students will learn and apply key concepts and theories of race and gender (for example, the masculine gaze, the white gaze, queer theories, critical race theory, postcolonial theories) with a critical emphasis on intersectionality in course discussions. Students will make new discoveries about familiar works from the narrative arts; understand the complex legacies of racist and sexist tropes underlying the conventions of popular genres (e.g., the western, the buddy movie, Sci-Fi, the great American novel, the American musical, and so on); and consider personal and collective responses to racism and sexism (e.g., personal viewing habits, social…

Full course description for Gender and Race in Literature and Film

This course explores the literature by African-American women writers from the 18th century to the present, analyzing their depictions of racism, sexism, and classism as artistic, moral, and civic responses to inequality. Students learn techniques for critical reading and literary analysis at the upper-division humanities level to understand how these creative works explore issues related to the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and the influence these writers had on cultural events, such as anti-lynching journalism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Era, and the Women's Liberation Movement.

Full course description for Black Women Writers

This course explores the rich tradition of Asian women's literary voices expressing their chosen themes in novels, diaries, anonymous folk poems, short stories, and lyric verse from ancient times to the present. Relevant aspects of geography, history, culture, and language support interpretations of representative works; regional focus may vary. All selections are read in English translation.

Full course description for Asian Women Writers

Through films, poetry, autobiography, novels, lyrics, and short essays, this intermediate-level survey course explores African-American literature from a historical perspective ranging from the works of enslaved authors to contemporary spoken-word poetry. The course celebrates the historical and aesthetic development of African-American literary arts in the face of (often legalized) racial oppression. Students learn techniques and theories for critical reading to explore literary issues related to culture, race, and social history. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism in this literature course.

Full course description for African-American Literature

This course explores the literature by African-American women writers from the 18th century to the present, analyzing their depictions of racism, sexism, and classism as artistic, moral, and civic responses to inequality. Students learn techniques for critical reading and literary analysis at the upper-division humanities level to understand how these creative works explore issues related to the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and the influence these writers had on cultural events, such as anti-lynching journalism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Era, and the Women's Liberation Movement.

Full course description for Black Women Writers

The course surveys Native American written, oral, musical, and filmic traditions, spanning voices from the pre-contact era to the contemporary moment. Readings develop themes and concepts central to Native narrative arts, such as cultural survival, migration, language and orality, landscape, folklore, spirituality, memory, colonization and decolonization, racism, violence, trauma, oppression, and sovereignty. Emphasizing an analytical approach, the course considers how marginalized indigenous arts participate in, react against, challenge, and redefine constructions of American literature. Significant focus is given to race and racism in this course.

Full course description for American Indian Literature

Students in this course examine literature, film, and expository articles to investigate ways that people of color represent their experiences as immigrants to the U.S. Throughout the course we analyze how various texts present the main themes, perspectives, and socio-cultural contexts of contemporary immigration, which has historically been shaped by racialized discourses and racist gatekeeping practices. We also interrogate how the concerns articulated by immigrants of color intersect with broader social categories such as race, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and citizenship status. Through lectures, discussions, compositions, and small-group activities, students will critically examine the complexities of acculturation and the creativity it takes to balance one's cultural heritage with life in another country as a racialized ethnic minority.

Full course description for Literature by Immigrants of Color

This course explores the rich tradition of Asian women's literary voices expressing their chosen themes in novels, diaries, anonymous folk poems, short stories, and lyric verse from ancient times to the present. Relevant aspects of geography, history, culture, and language support interpretations of representative works; regional focus may vary. All selections are read in English translation.

Full course description for Asian Women Writers

This course will explore the ways Asian American novels, short stories, poetry and film represent, elaborate and challenge how we understand Asian American experience as is it informed by race, gender, sexuality and age. Focusing on major texts of Asian American literature from the early 20th century to the present, we will discuss how and why the study of Asian American literature emerged from its historical exclusion from the U.S literary canon, and how this exclusion is tied to structural racism in the academy, a major institution in U.S. cultural gatekeeping. We will also discuss how the study of Asian American literature benefits from understanding broader historical and political issues relevant to the Asian American experience. To this end, we will read and discuss relevant primary texts and secondary criticism on topics such as (but not limited to), law, citizenship, labor, imperialism, war, anti-Asian racism, comparative racialization, queer identities and activism to deepen…

Full course description for Asian American Literature

The cultural foundations of the West stand on the bedrock of the ancient Near East: writing, literature, art, architecture, science, mathematics and religion reach back past Rome and Greece to Mesopotamia, Egypt and Anatolia. This course provides an introduction to the literature, history and culture of that period, c. 3100-600 B.C.

Full course description for The First Civilizations

In this course, students read and enjoy classic works of literature, history and philosophy from the eighth to first centuries before the common era, by such writers as Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Plato. The course explores characteristics of ancient Greece and its continuing influence on intellectual history.

Full course description for The Classical World: Greece

Over a thousand-year span, Rome grew from an insecure settlement on the Tiber River to an empire dominating most of Europe, North Africa and the Near East. Even after 1,500 years, Europe and the Americas continue to reflect Roman political, technological, literary and intellectual culture, to which this course provides an introduction.

Full course description for The Classical World: Rome

In this course, students study achievements in thought, art, architecture, religion, science and politics during the Middle Ages, the period between the collapse of Roman civilization (c. 500 A.D.) and its "rebirth" in the Renaissance about a thousand years later. Students read a selection of medieval texts in translation and examine a range of medieval arts and ideas.

Full course description for Medieval Civilization

This course explores the art, literature, philosophy, religion, and science of the European Renaissance (c. 1350-1650 A.D.), placing them in the context of political and social movements of the time. In this era, increased attention to ancient Greek and Roman ideas energized all of the arts and sciences. This period also saw the beginnings of the centrally administered nation state and the rise of colonialism in the New World, as well as the Protestant Reformation, a many-sided and far-reaching religious revolution that reshaped Christianity. Readings, slide/lectures, and class discussions explore the many ways that art, ideas, and events from this era still live in contemporary European and American civilizations.

Full course description for The Renaissance

The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to eighteenth-century doubts about Christianity and optimism about progress based on "enlightenment" or reason. If science could penetrate the secrets of nature, perhaps the same methods could be used in economics and politics? The resulting conflict between new ideas and ancient inequities led to political revolutions in America and France, and to cultural revolutions in industry, literature, philosophy and the arts. Students in this course study significant works by seventeenth and eighteenth century writers, thinkers and artists.

Full course description for The Enlightenment

In the late nineteenth century, the romantic figure of the artist as an outsider who criticized society, yet helped rejuvenate mankind, evolved into the figure of the artist as a revolutionary adversary of society. Artists in the twentieth century questioned older social, philosophical and artistic forms and sought to create radically new, "modern" forms. To understand this development and how it has influenced the contemporary world, this course examines several influential modern(ist) texts, in connection with other developments in modern art, music, politics and thought.

Full course description for Modernism

Post-WWII Western societies pushed the Modernists' radical rejection of traditional aesthetics to the extreme limit, developing a new theoretical and aesthetic movement called Postmodernism. From the blurring of high and low culture, through the use of pastiche, collage, and bricolage, to the status of the object in an era of simulacra, the period is characterized by a number of distinct techniques and critical theories which we'll explore in a wide variety of art, film, new media, literature, architecture, and music.

Full course description for Postmodernism

Myths and myth cycles have had a deep and pervasive influence on literature and culture, and thus on everyday life. This course examines the nature of myth and the modes of belief that have sustained it within various traditions, the myths themselves, their expression in literature from ancient to modern times, and theories of interpretation. The selection varies among Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, Celtic and Germanic myth traditions, along with comparative material from other world traditions.

Full course description for Myth

Folklore was and is part of everyone's everyday experience. This course examines the nature of folklore; the study, analysis and interpretation of folklore; various folk traditions; and real-life examples and uses of folk-lore. While emphasizing traditions of the United States, the course also presents aspects of folklore of other selected regions.

Full course description for Folklore

This course explores the time period in medieval Spain when the three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) coexisted somewhat peacefully and created together a rich, vibrant culture from 700-1492. "Convivencia" means "living together." We will examine the poetry, architecture, art, music, governance, and religious practices during this period: how a culture flourished, and how it fell apart. We'll also study how persecutions (including those against pagans), and the diasporas of Jews and Muslims out of Spain influenced these texts, structures, and practices.

Full course description for Convivencia: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Arts in Medieval Spain

This course will study the Harlem Renaissance, a period of incredible productivity and creativity among black artists and intellectuals between 1920-1940, centered in Harlem, New York. The course considers how concepts -- such as race; the New Negro movement; Jim Crow, segregation, and racism; so-called racial uplift and the Talented Tenth; the Great Migration; the Roaring Twenties, and Modernism were manifested in the works of art, literature, philosophy, film, and music of Harlem's artists and thinkers. In addition to learning the specialized vocabulary and skills involved in the analysis of works from a variety of artistic genres, students will learn how Harlem's leading black intellectuals tied aesthetic theories to social and racialized principles of artistic production, inspiring some artists while prompting others to openly rebel. Given that the Harlem Renaissance is not characterized by any one style, technique, or manifesto, well pay special attention to connections among…

Full course description for The Harlem Renaissance

This course provides a systematic study of Shakespeare's unique literary and dramatic achievements. Close readings and written exercises focus attention on Shakespeare's mastery of the English language and the craft of poetry. Students typically read a selection of plays including histories, comedies and tragedies.

Full course description for Shakespeare

This course surveys influential literary theories from the time of Aristotle until the mid-twentieth century. Students become familiar with the main concepts of each theory and with how these theories have been applied by their developers and by subsequent critics. Students learn to apply theories to particular texts, both past and present. Discussions often focus on what distinguishes literature from other uses of language, how literature should be written, what purposes literature should serve, and how to recognize quality in literature.

Full course description for Literary Criticism: Beginnings-1950

This course introduces influential literary theories developed between 1950 and the present. Students become familiar with the main concepts of each theory and with how these theories can be applied to particular texts, past and present. Discussions focus on how contemporary theory challenges older ideas about literature, what distinguishes literature from other uses of language, how literature should be read, what roles literature plays in social, political, and personal life, and what makes a work of literature effective.

Full course description for Literary Criticism: 1950-Present

This course emphasizes the evolution of English in connection with historical, social, literary and linguistic forces. Topics addressed include Old English language in the Anglo-Saxon culture; the effects on English of the Norman Conquest, the Renaissance and the invention of printing; British colonialism; the spread of English to Asia, Africa and America; the modern development of the language; and underlying principles of change ruling various types of linguistic phenomena that take place during the natural historical development of a language.

Full course description for History of the English Language

This capstone course for English majors focuses on integrative processes in the study of literature. (The course is also open to appropriately prepared nonmajors.) Students work together as a community of inquiry to study a particular author, genre, period or problem selected for each section by the instructor. Each student completes a course paper or project using concepts and methods derived from this and other literature courses to explore a literary topic of personal interest. Prerequisite: Students completing an English major must be within two semesters of graduation. Other students must secure the instructor's consent before registering.

Full course description for Literature Capstone Seminar