English

An introduction to the seminar method of instruction, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts. For a full description of this section of the course, please see the enhanced course information.

This course will entail the reading of all of Austen's novels, in addition to selective readings of her juvenilia and letters. One of our primary goals will involve situating Austen's novels within the social and political contexts of her historical time. We will thus complement the joy of reading Austen with the intellectual fascination of tracking how her writings relate to some of the major historical developments of her time, such as the French Revolution, the slave trade, the growth of empire, the expansion of war across the European continent, and the "revolution in female manners" advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft. Readings of Austen will be supplemented with readings derived from these various historical contexts. We will also attend to the ways that Austen interacts with other major writers from her era, the age of British Romanticism. We will also periodically watch and discuss recent film versions of Austen's novels. Students will gain not only a deepened appreciation of the wonderful complexity of Austen's novels but also how these works emerge from and respond to the historical and cultural intricacies of British Romanticism. Reserved for Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars.

This lively class introduces you to the writing of fiction, poetry and other genres. Students will study published works in various media, try their hands at writing in an array of forms and genres, share their work with others, and receive feedback that lets them improve their craft. By the end of the semester, you will have a facility with the forms, genres, and media of contemporary writing, a portfolio of work to build on in other courses or on your own.

This lively class introduces you to the writing of fiction. Students will study published works in various media, try their hands at writing in an array of forms and genres, share their work with others, and receive feedback that lets them improve their craft. By the end of the semester, you will have a facility with the forms, genres, and media of contemporary writing, a portfolio of work to build on in other courses or on your own.

This course will introduce you to contemporary poetry in a variety of media and formats and from an array of lively, diverse voices. Through in- and out-of-class assignments you'll learn how poets draft and revise; you'll practice techniques, genres and forms; and you'll generate a poetry portfolio of your own. Class format will include discussion, in-class activities, and opportunities for feedback on student work.

In this introductory course we will focus on 1) reading traditional and innovative 20th-and 21st-century American short stories and 2) on workshopping original student writing. In order to examine the range of narrative strategies available to us as writers, we will read speculative, meta-fictional, hyper-real and surreal fictions, as well as essays on the art of writing. Throughout the course of the semester students will develop as story-tellers, and will learn to read as writers and critique work-in-progress.

While the words “creative” and “nonfiction” might seem an odd pairing, the combination is rooted in a long tradition of telling stories, making personal observations and employing a variety of literary techniques to communicate facts. In this course, students will read, analyze, and discuss the works of creative nonfiction writers. This course is for beginners as well as more experienced writers who want to delve into the still-evolving genre of creative nonfiction, which includes personal essay, memoir, documentary, and literary journalism. Students will also write their own work and discuss it in class.

This course will investigate constructions of gender and authority in women's writing from late medieval Europe (c. 1200-1430). We'll read works written for the court, from religious houses, and on the road to explore how these different social locations shaped authors' access to resources and informed their creative decisions. Reading selected critical essays will help us analyze these works through a feminist lens to understand how medieval women authors engaged with patriarchal literary traditions and social structures. All works will be read in translation; no prior knowledge of medieval literature is expected.

Despite our tendency to distinctly divide medieval and modern thought and practices, our literature reflects how deeply connected we remain to a medieval past. Medieval romance illuminates how our fascination with alternative realities and dystopian worlds has endured since the Middle Ages. This course examines the development of imagined worlds and the figures that inhabit them in medieval literature, then considers how these elements continuously manifest and metamorphose through the historical periods that follow, including our own. Where does our obsession with the otherworldly originate in medieval texts? What do our constructions of alternative places and peoples suggest about the desires and anxieties of a particular historical moment? How does dystopian literature draw its inspiration from the medieval imagination?

A three-credit course in writing pedagogy for students working as tutors in the University Writing Center.

Globally, the late 1960s were volatile and deadly. A decade that began with young idealism and revolutionary possibilities, ended with raised fists and the beginnings of violent terror. 1968 was particularly transformative. It was the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; the year that the Chicago Eight were arrested for conspiracy and inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention; the year that students across France brought the French economy to a halt; and the year that demonstrations in Northern Ireland demanding equal representation for Unionists and Nationalist escalated. In this course we will examine the political, religious, and cultural events of 1968-69 by exploring texts that were created during that period, and texts that have been created since to reflect the era. We will focus our attention on theatre, literature, music, and art created in the United States and Ireland that captures how class, generational, gender, religious, and racial conflicts led to bloody violence.

Experience great literature in a way that fits easily into your life at Notre Dame! This one-credit class allows you to read a few works of literature over the course of the semester -- just one larger work, or a few shorter ones, divided up over the weeks of the term. You will be guided by an expert English Department faculty member leading the class, and by opportunities for discussion with your peers in the classroom.

Trust is the basis of our economy, our democracy, our most intimate relationships, and our capacity to engage in any form of complex planning. It is surprising, then, that there is no consensus definition of what it is for two parties to trust one another. Instead, there are many methodologies for studying trust that bring together perspectives from the humanities and social sciences. This course examines the role of trust as a foundational and sometimes overlooked building block of society. Students will learn to identify the role that implicit trust plays in underwriting many basic social functions, engage with guests contributing to an interdisciplinary perspective, and discuss the implications of each disciplinary lens for the importance of building trust for the future.

This course will focus on the introduction to the novel as a form, a means to view the world of the author/artist and the reader. Literature is an art whereby one consciousness seeks to communicate with another consciousness. One of the artist's techniques for controlling this flow is the concept of point of view. We will explore various approaches and uses of this "framing" in some nineteenth and twentieth century novels. The goal is to use an understanding of point of view to more fully comprehend, enjoy, and sensitively read this popular genre. Texts: Henry James, Turn of the Screw; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; James Joyce, Dubliners; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime; Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha; and Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America. Requirements: regular class participation; two short papers, a mid-term; and a final.

How does our understanding of early American literature change when we take account of the rich archive produced by the original inhabitants of North America? To answer this question, students will read a range of Indigenous narratives, beginning with a reinterpretation of Pocahontas and proceeding to explore self-representation in Native writing from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This will include non-alphabetic "texts" such woven baskets, sermons, autobiographies, poetry, and novels. The course concludes with the work of Simon Pokagon, a member of the Pokagon Potawatomi Indians whose traditional homeland encompasses the current location of the University of Notre Dame. Central topics to be discussed are the role of Indigenous peoples in the formation of early American literature, the complex relationship between Native writers and Christianity, and various Indigenous critiques of and alternatives to settler colonialism.

"Mysteries" have become a dominant genre; their proliferation is a sign of modernity. What do we find in tales of crime and detection that we don't find elsewhere? Have these stories taken over from tragedy as the genre mainly dedicated to death? Such stories exercise our minds, while evoking also fearful delight in the unknown (or the "sublime" as defined by Edmund Burke). We read to learn fear—cultivated in the "gothic" mode and central to the Romantic-era short stories of Hoffmann and Poe. Even the lightest "mystery stories" touch our anxiety about the instability of the outer world of social order; is it about to tip over? Fear of the foreign and of disorder have made some mystery stories historically vehicles of prejudice ,while others take us beyond our current boundaries towards new relationships. Stories of "detection" enforce modern scientific logic. Their hero is the mind not to be baffled by the cleverest criminal, not to be taken in by the fictions of identity that we produce even in our "normal" lives. Sherlock Holmes is the hero of the intensive intellect-- the more effective as he never entirely blends into his own culture in the first place. Stories of detection from Sophocles on point to the problematic nature of identity, which can be shaped, tweaked, hidden or faked. Spy stories emphasize this point, for the job of the "spy" is to read a culture and blend into it. The observer or narrator also becomes problematic, given the limitations of individual points of view (as we recognize in The Moonstone's multiple narrators). Mystery stories can be used to examine social structures, political realities, sexual feelings, relationships and rules. Characters always include those with and those lacking power, including servants, women and minorities; in the 20th century mystery stories are increasingly written by women and members of minority groups. Narratives may point to inbuilt injustices, or to the aberrant individual, the killer who looks "normal". We like the idea that humans are multi -layered; the interpretation of signs or clues becomes more exciting. Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams proposes that the individual is a mystery who produces clues for himself (and the analyst) in dreams. The problem of identity is a rich source of tragedy and comedy; interpretation of signs or clues becomes more exciting. Detection itself can be a form of enjoyable obsession, and our suspicions may extend to the detective, that hero of reason in a world not governed by reason. TRUE CRIME: We will examine some "true crime" documents of the 18th and 19th centuries, including trials and confessions, while also looking at the development of policing through the growth of Scotland yard. FILMS: The selection of TV shows or movies is up to the students who will divide into report teams and present the film of their choice. TEXTS include one play by Sophocles; the short story of "Susannah and the Elders" in the Biblical Apocrypha; Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy ( a Renaissance revenge play); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful ; The Tryal of Miss Mary Blandy ;William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Ann Radcliffe, Sicilian Romance; short stories by E.T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allen Poe (to be selected); Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams ( excerpts); Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone; Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished novel); Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four; Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; Peril at End House; Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress.

From Hebrew Scripture to modern science fiction and horror, prophecy has long served as an incredibly powerful mode of literary expression, often grappling with questions of divine authority, historical and/or personal crises, political intrigue, and the boundaries of human knowledge. The seductive authority of prophetic speech—its claims to types of certainty, inevitability, and divine warrant—can obscure competing motives that blur the boundaries between revelation, persuasion, and spectacle. At the same time, the seeming anarchy of prophetic forms can be deployed to resist typical aesthetic models and produce revolutionary and/or rupturing ideas. In this course, we will explore these ideas and others at the intersections of literature and prophecy, examining how prophetic voices and writings (whether sacred, political, or poetic) challenge conventional notions of truth, time, types of knowing, and authorship. We will read texts spanning multiple genres and historical periods, including excerpts from Hebrew Scripture, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Kafka, Ballard, Kōbō Abe, Borges, Morrison, Gibson, Le Guin, Butler, Chiang, Cadigan, Danielewski, VanderMeer, and Samuel R. Delany. Alongside primary texts, we will also engage with critical theories regarding prophecy, voice, reception, and affect in order to consider how literature appropriates, imitates, subverts, and (re-)creates prophetic authority. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify how prophetic modes negotiate truth, time, and authorship; trace the material infrastructures that enable or constrain prophetic voices; distinguish between teleological “fulfillment” models and open, affective, or probabilistic ones; and critique the politics of inspiration as it moves between sacred text, rhetoric, and popular culture. In short, we will investigate how prophetic discourse has shaped literary production and traditions, and how writers have both exploited and contested the risks and promises of speaking in the name of divinity and the future.

Monsters manifest in the earliest manuscripts containing English literature and continue to capture our collective imagination. Cultural conceptions of monsters may change over time, but monstrous entities never cease to appear in the writings of any given era. These creatures shapeshift from magical beasts to medical inventions to ravenous murderers across the centuries, and their depictions resonate differently depending on the historical context. This course explores monsters and monstrosity in British literature from the medieval period to the modern age. It not only investigates how monsters are represented but also interrogates the underlying anxieties that define their textual presence. What constitutes monstrosity? By what means are monsters created? In what ways do monsters reflect and reveal our deepest fears? What do we fear and why do we fear it?

This introductory course surveys the core texts, doctrines, ideas, and cultural controversies related to First Amendment protections for free expression. We will be especially interested in some large questions: what is expression? How have our ideas of freedom of expression evolved as we enter the digital age? What kind of expression should be permissible? What happens when the public forum is fully online? What is the relationship between free expression and democratic-self government? Is there a difference between individual, group, and government speech? How do we navigate alternative ways of thinking about free expression in a global media ecosystem? We will consider a selection of exemplary cases, controversies, and literary texts: among our topics will include the following: the transformation of speech in the age of digital media; libel, satire and parody; piracy, intellectual property and copyright; privacy and surveillance; hate speech and incitement; obscenity and pornography. We will investigate the topic by studying relevant case law, literary texts (including fiction, film and new media), political philosophy, and information policy. Disclaimer: you will encounter speech that is potentially offensive and discomforting in this course.

This introductory course surveys the core texts, doctrines, ideas, and cultural controversies related to First Amendment protections for free expression. We will be especially interested in some large questions: what is expression? How have our ideas of freedom of expression evolved as we enter the digital age? What kind of expression should be permissible? What happens when the public forum is fully online? What is the relationship between free expression and democratic-self government? Is there a difference between individual, group, and government speech? How do we navigate alternative ways of thinking about free expression in a global media ecosystem? We will consider a selection of exemplary cases, controversies, and literary texts: among our topics will include the following: the transformation of speech in the age of digital media; libel, satire and parody; piracy, intellectual property and copyright; privacy and surveillance; hate speech and incitement; obscenity and pornography. We will investigate the topic by studying relevant case law, literary texts (including fiction, film and new media), political philosophy, and information policy? Disclaimer: you will encounter speech that is potentially offensive and discomforting in this course. Note: this course is delivered fully online. The course design combines required live weekly meetings online with self-scheduled lectures, problems, assignments, and interactive learning materials. To participate, students will need to have a computer with webcam, reliable internet connection, and a quiet place to participate in live sessions.

Violent video games make people violent. Philosophers waste their time debating whether tables exist. The ideas behind these statements can be traced back to an “ancient quarrel” between poets and philosophers (Plato, Republic). By reading philosophical and literary texts by great poets and philosophers, including (among others) Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Shelley, Shakespeare, and Keats, this course will explore the “ancient quarrel” between poets and philosophers and its continuing relevance in modern art and culture. In class discussions and written assignments, we will learn to make arguments about the philosophy of literature and practise literary analysis of both philosophical and literary texts.

Some of the best stories are told by the naughtiest of narrators. Using the study of naughty narrators as an introduction into narrative theory, this course will think about the study of narrative not just as the study of relations, but also as the performance of a storyteller. This course will focus on how naughty narrators are often social pariahs – differently abled, casually overlooked, racially marginalized, or even children. Our job will be to study how these badly behaved storytellers perform in a transgressive way against a world that has framed them as a problem from the start.

Central to this course is the study of Shakespeare and Tolkien, both of whom, while separated by over 300 years, nevertheless "stay in the mind." We will examine in-depth Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Lord of the Rings, aiming to hone your ability to read closely and carefully and to write strong literary analyses. We will also examine these works in the context of contemporary education (where, for example, students complain about reading in part because they lack the skills and patience to read long or difficult texts), aiming to address questions about the purpose of literature and issues of literacy in our schools today.

This course offers an introduction to modern and contemporary Irish- language literature. We begin tracing the influence of the Revival and cultural nationalism on the development of a modern literature in the Irish language. We read key texts in the light of the national narrative, taking note of cultural change and contested identities while also considering the specificities of a literature that can trace an unbroken line to what is often described as the oldest vernacular literature in Europe. Among the texts discussed will be work by Pearse, Ó Conaire, the Blasket autobiographies, Ó Cadhain, Tiley, Ó Conghaile, Ó Ríordáin, Ní Dhomhnaill, Ní Ghriofa among others. All texts will be read in translation. Relevant documentaries will also be used and shown in class to further illustrate and elucidate the work of particular authors. This course fulfills the survey requirement for the IRll major. Texts studied in translation. No prior knowledge of the Irish language necessary.

In this course, we will challenge the single story/ies U.S. schools and curricula have told about books, characters, and cultural groups by focusing on literature by and about people from various populations that have been traditionally underrepresented in the United States. We will discuss young adult literature from parallel cultures (including possible works by and about African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/as, Native Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, and other ethnic groups), as well as literature by and about populations traditionally defined by class, religion, ability, gender and sexuality. Course participants will investigate theoretical perspectives, issues, controversies, and educational implications for these texts, including race and racism, whiteness and privilege (in society and in the educational system), and critical literacy. As an extension of the course, we will also examine the young adult literature market and how contemporary media may reinforce or resist the stereotypes, labels, and single stories associated with these cultures. Possible texts include All American Boys, American Born Chinese (graphic novel), a Jacqueline Woodson novel, Openly Straight, a canonical text like To Kill a Mockingbird, Every Day, and several choice options, including a Classic/Newberry text, one text representing a non-abled bodied protagonist, and one contemporary text.

If a trip abroad doesn't end with a #wanderlust Instagram post, did it actually happen? From the medieval invention of travel writing to Kylie Jenner's most recent Instagram post, humans have always used art to capture their journeys. This course asks you to read narratives of travel produced by writers from the Middle Ages alongside examples from our own contemporary moment. A broad interpretation of the term 'literatures' will allow us to recognize and read into deep veins of similarity that run between medieval manuscripts and today's Internet. You will have the opportunity to compare the earliest examples of travel writing, left to us by medieval pilgrims, with some of the most innovative kinds of travel writing being produced today. As we will see, the ways these pilgrims wrote about their travels and thought about the written word bear some striking similarities to (and some major differences from!) the ways we depict and narrativize our adventures today. At its core, the class asks you to explore whether engagements with places abroad are complete without representation, and so as we read and discuss the course literatures, you will be asked to produce both analytical work about the texts we explore as well as your own creative travel accounts on the Michiana area.

This writing-intensive course will immerse students in the rich literary tradition of physician-writers by inviting them to engage in the practice of life writing (personal essay, memoir, diary, journal keeping, and oral history) in response to their experiences as patients, as caregivers, and as aspiring medical professionals pursuing a variety of majors (in the Sciences and Humanities) at the University. In addition to regular creative prompts, students will write analytically and critically in response to work by a diverse list of medical professionals, patients, and caregivers from the last 100 years. Special focus will be placed on the ways writing aids in the development of a sense of personal ethics, and how the practice of writing can be used as a therapeutic tool. The course will cover a wide range of genres and texts from the late 19th century to the present, with an emphasis on writings where the author is engaged in self-analysis, reflection on class, privilege, difference, and advocacy.

Although the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation and fall occupies only a brief passage in Genesis, this narrative has profoundly influenced interpretations of womanhood, marriage, and humanity’s quest for knowledge. Eve has been portrayed in diverse and evolving ways, reflecting the shifting attitudes toward gender, morality, and the nature of sin. Answers to the age-old question: “why did Eve eat from the tree” reflect vastly different world views. Did Eve seek to be more God-like, or was her “weaker” female mind deceived by the serpent’s rhetoric? This course explores portrayals of Eve across time in literature, art, and cultural discourse. Through this, the course examines how poets, artists, and thinkers have alternately condemned and revered the first woman, the so-called mother of all mankind. By the end of the course, students will grapple with questions central to Eve’s enduring relevance. Should Eve be honored as the ideal subservient wife, condemned as the seducing temptress whose choice– as Milton wrote of the first taste of the forbidden fruit– “Brought death into the world, and all our woe,” or lauded as a symbol of the environmental movement?

In literature and the humanities, we use the term theory to demarcate a way of looking at things. For example, a gender theorist insists upon the importance of gender or sexual identities, a Marxist theorist emphasizes how economic conditions affect social and political realities, and a narrative theorist examines the importance of such matters as perspective and plotting in storytelling. Rather than promoting one theoretical perspective, this course surveys numerous styles of literary theory and criticism. Students will come to understand key features and issues in topics such as: aesthetic theory; Marxism; psychoanalysis; various feminisms, gender theory and masculinity; structuralism and post-structuralism; race and ethnicity studies; and more. There is a great deal of sheer fun and surprise in learning about these various approaches. But such knowledge is also empowering, raising our consciousness concerning our own commitments and interests as readers and citizens. This course is therefore of special value to students anticipating subsequent thesis writing or graduate study in the humanities, social sciences, and law. Our principal text is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd Ed.). It's a typically huge Norton tome but worth the wrist damage as a superb launching point into numerous areas of literary and cultural theory. Graded coursework involves several midterm papers and a final paper exploring a point of theory controversy that interests you individually, critiquing a theorist or applying a theoretical approach to a literary or cultural context of your choosing. Regular journal writings and active participation are also graded factors.

What are stories? Where do they come from, how do they work, what do they do to us? This course will explore the hidden structures of all kinds of narratives, from nineteenth-century novels to Hollywood blockbusters. We will examine the ways in which our understanding of our own lives and their meaning is unconsciously shaped by certain narrative forms and assumptions.

What makes a work of literature "beautiful"? What makes it "ugly"? Is it really in the eye of the beholder or is there an objective dimension to our aesthetic judgements? And what role might theological modes of thinking play in our perception of the beautiful in contemporary society? In this course, we will trace the development of these aesthetic questions, paying particular attention to works that complicate the binary between beauty and ugliness. We will consider various conceptions of beauty, from the classical confluence of form and splendor to the "pleasing terror" of the Romantic sublime, reading authors ranging from John Donne to T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth to James Joyce on our way to developing a nuanced theological aesthetic vocabulary for appreciating both art that attracts and repels.

When I say woman writer, do you think Jane Austen? The story of women's writing is a history of forgetting. A monumental tragedy that should remind us that the historical marginalization of women still shapes our social, literary, and political landscape. This course will begin a process of remembering by focusing on the figure of the woman who writes. Hers is a history of desiring change - in herself, her community, and her place in the world. But what happens when women write back to power? How did women writers conceive of the power of writing? In what ways was women's writing an act of self-assertion and political resistance? What role did women writers and characters play in the expansion of our idea of the social, literary, political possibilities of the work of writing? Writing oneself into existence is a multi-faceted process - it's energizing as well as traumatic, liberating as well as dangerous. The course will focus on literary representations of these experiences. Readings will include literary texts by Margaret Cavendish, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, and other multimedia texts such as films, podcasts, and songs.

The commercial success of Challengers (2024) elevated love triangles to the center of cultural discourse. The trope of the love triangle, however, has a long and storied history in English literature. This course takes a sweeping tour of the literary love triangle, following it from Medieval romance to Shakespearean comedy, from the 19th century novel of manners to contemporary realist fiction, and from the distinguished mansions of New York socialites to the windy back alleys of New Rochelle. Traversing multiple literary media—verse, drama, novel, and film—this course traces the politics of gender, desire, and propriety that animate three-sided romances. Along the way, we’ll ask the following questions: how does literary romance both respond to and shape normative social values? How do love triangles in particular both conform to and push the limits of social norms? How do authors across time use their medium to represent love and loathing, desire and envy? What can studying romance teach us about the evolution (or stagnation) of gender politics? Finally, what (and how) can romance teach us about the societies that produced these literatures? Ultimately, this course seeks to understand what makes love triangles such an effective and enduring device in the literary imagination.

In 1968, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American literature, ushering in an unprecedented era of Native literary production widely known as the Native American Renaissance. Today, many readers consider this the "arrival" of Native authors on the American literary scene. While the explosion of Native writing and the critical tradition that emerged from it carved out much needed cultural and institutional spaces for Native self-representation and Native Studies, it also had the unintended effect of privileging contemporary Native novels over writing from other periods and across a variety of genres and forms. This introductory course on Native American literature widens the net to include an array of Native self-representation across genres, regions, periods, forms, and tribal nations, offering an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Native Studies. Class discussions and written assignments will explore questions of genre and form as well as issues related to identity, sovereignty, environmental activism, and survivance.

Why do white supremacists care about Beowulf? What does Chaucer have to do with #MeToo? Why do we turn to William Shakespeare to understand Donald Trump? This course will attempt to answer these and other questions as we undertake an examination of how premodern literature informs and interacts with modern concerns. We'll accomplish this by looking closely at four canonical texts across early British literature - Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Julius Caesar, and Paradise Lost - and considering how they've been used in recent contemporary debates about race, sexual assault, and politics. We'll not only wrestle with the complexities of these texts and their reception histories but also think deeply about the function of literature, and literary scholarship, in public life. Our discussions will culminate in a class website on which you'll showcase your own pieces of public scholarship on premodern texts. Assignments include reading responses, blog posts, think pieces, and a podcast project.

"A person should be wise enough - but never too wise; life is most pleasant for those who know just enough". Old Norse proverb, from Hávamál. In this course, students will come to grips with Old Norse - a term that encompasses the medieval vernacular languages of Scandinavia and the vernacular literatures that flourished in Norway and Iceland between the Viking Age and the Reformation. The Old Norse literary corpus is remarkable for its breadth and variety, its literary quality and its cultural value: Norse manuscripts preserve our fullest record of pre-Christian mythology from northern Europe; traditional Germanic narrative and poetic traditions are uniquely well-represented in Old Norse versions, some of which date back to well before the Conversion; in the Icelandic sagas, one of Europe's most distinctive medieval genres, we see an unprecedented forerunner of "realistic" prose fiction. Knowledge of Old Norse also gives access to many primary sources relating to the perennially controversial and fascinating Vikings, who took their language as far afield as Russia, Rome, Reykjavik and Rouen. (And Old Norse was probably the first European language spoken in North America.) Over the course of a semester, we will learn the fundamentals of Old Norse grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Although it has some quirks, Old Norse is not a particularly difficult language to pick up, and students will soon be able to read a saga in the original. We will introduce students to the history and literature of medieval Scandinavia, using translations at first but gradually bringing in original language material as our mastery of Old Norse increases. This course will be assessed by means of regular grammar quizzes and translation exercises, and a final exam.

This course investigates three key Shakespeare plays - Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Othello - on the stage and the page. We will give detailed attention to core philosophical, theatrical, literary, and political questions in each play, and consider the contemporary global encounter with Shakespeare in multiple literary/linguistic traditions and media forms (film, graphic novel, digital media). No previous experience with Shakespeare is required.

Shakespeare is for good reason one of the most beloved and influential writers who has ever lived. More than 400 years after his death, his plays and adaptations of his plays continue to be produced on every continent but Antarctica, in a host of languages, including Arabic, Catalan, Hindi, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Maori, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Tibetan, Urdu, and Yoruba. English speakers have the luxury of hearing and reading Shakespeare in his own words. In this course we will read a selection of his plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. We will explore how Shakespeare transformed the stories that he borrowed and retold, and how he called into being a stunning variety of worlds. We will see the plays as both products of early modern England and as speaking to our own time. We will find that the plays are as approachable as they are brilliant. There will be several small assignments, quizzes if necessary, two papers, and a final exam.

This course introduces students to a wide variety of themes in Shakespeare's plays as well as to the plays' context and conventions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the plays' nature as scripts for the stage and, more recently, film. However the course will primarily focus on the difficulties of social interaction and self knowledge as seen in Shakespeare's use of plays-within-plays and of theatrical themes and language.

William Shakespeare composed his plays over 400 years ago, and yet they continue to be performed, revised, adapted for contemporary audiences, sometimes far removed from their original shape. But when we transform a centuries-old piece of literature into a contemporary stage play, movie, high school curriculum, or comic book, what are the stakes? What do we gain—or lose—in the process of adaptation? This course will explore issues of form, content, and audience when adapting Shakespeare's plays. We'll read four plays—Hamlet, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest—and analyze a variety of adaptations ranging from live productions, YA fiction, and graphic novels to investigate how each of these texts responds to the original plays while also becoming literary creations in their own right. We will apply our growing knowledge by creating our own adaptations to share with one another.

While the rise of the individual has long been understood as a defining aspect of early modern England (16th and 17th century), this period is also a time when the ideas of the common good and the commonwealth (res publica) became central topics of intellectual conversations. In this course, we will examine how early modern contemporaries in England attempted to understand, define, and reconcile the idea of the individual with the promotion of the common good. This course focuses on the works of English Renaissance humanists from Thomas More to John Milton who sought to comprehend the present and imagine a better future by looking back toward the classical past. In examining these scholars' attitudes toward antiquity, students are encouraged to reflect on their own relationship with the past in order to navigate the current political climate where values of the common good are perceived as antithetical to individual rights and freedom.

Women have been associated with original sin since the temptation of Eve. They are redeemed through their connection with the Virgin Mary but condemned again by the conflicting demands of chastity and marriage. Christian misogyny merged with medical treatises during the Middle Ages to create a complex matrix through which female and male bodies were understood and women's and men's social expectations were constructed. This course investigates the ways in which Old and Middle English literature both reflects and resists the tropes that posited women as either properly chaste or overly sexed. It explores representations of women in writing and film and considers how medieval conceptions of women move forward into the modern era. What did it mean to be a woman in the Middle Ages? How have premodern ideas about gendered bodies and behaviors come to bear on contemporary ideology? To what extent does the modern era remain in the shadow of its medieval past?

"Da Vinci, Google, the people who brought you the board game Operation - some of the most skillful hands and minds in history have attempted to depict and teach the human body. Could you do better? This project-centered course introduces you to the history of anatomical illustration as an art and data science. We will focus on understanding its many trajectories from early print to digital media so as to imagine new, more inclusive futures as we also try to lower the barrier to entry for anatomical knowledge."

Did you know that King Charlemagne had a pet elephant? Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Animals are everywhere in medieval literature: animals brought from far away, animals that speak with human voices, dogs that fight trial by combat, hunting hounds, roosters that are full of themselves, and foxes too clever for their own good. We will explore the literary significance of animals, and how animals influence and become integral to cultural ideas – up to and including what it means to be a human being. Animals will serve as our point of departure to learn about fundamental concepts and skills essential to the study of literature. Together, we will discuss a wide range of stories from the Middle Ages, practice literary analysis, and learn to hone our analysis and our skill at writing with essays and research about animals in the literature of the Middle Ages.

Next to religion and war, no topic seemed to capture the imagination of medieval and Renaissance England quite as much as romantic love. Thus, this course seeks to read a survey of exemplary medieval and Renaissance love poetry, asking as we go along: What are the features of the medieval and Renaissance love poem? How do we write about and analyze these poems? Did medieval and Renaissance writers think of romantic love in the same way we do? What can medieval and Renaissance writing about love tell us about the social, cultural, and political environment in which it was written? And, finally, can medieval and Renaissance love poetry provide modern readers with new conceptions for thinking and writing about romantic love in our own age? This course will particularly rely on historicist methods of literary analysis, including gender and sexuality theory. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to respond to the poetry we read through both critical and creative means, though the final product for all students will be an argumentative research essay. Each week will also include at least one short in-class lecture and interactive exercise on a writing strategy/skill in order to prepare students for the final paper. All readings will be provided in modern English.

What does it mean when we label something - an experience, a story, a work of art - as "real" or "realistic"? How do we evaluate the correspondence between reality and fiction? Literary realism has often been associated with a steadfast and often unimaginative faithfulness to reality. In this course, we will read realism differently. Studying the evolution of literary realism, we will consider how writers and their narratives struggle to reflect their fidelity to the real-world and art-world. What happens when narrative worlds cannot be reduced to or "pin down" reality? We will focus on the creative and imaginative, often experimental, capacity of literary realism that works to defamiliarize, multiply, or challenge constructed realities. Humans, as Gertrude Stein wrote, "are interested in two things. They are interested in reality and interested in telling about it." This course will take up the study of American literary realism to trace how these two interests intersect in how we construct representations of reality. We will consider different forms of realism, from social realism, naturalism, and magical realism to realism in philosophy, pop-culture, film and television, and videogames.

Shakespeare's plays were written for the stage, and yet most students only grapple with them on the page. This course gives you the chance to investigate and interpret six of Shakespeare's plays through the dual lenses of text and performance. Particular emphasis will be paid to the relationship between the page and stage in regards to performance history, print culture, editorial / directorial emendation, appropriation and adaptation. We will watch professionally pre-recorded performances and enjoy at least one live performance. In addition to reading, writing, and viewing, you will take "the stage" yourself to perform a scene(s) from the plays, considering staging, props, and other avenues of interpretation. All along the way, we will consider the historical evolution and reinvention of Shakespeare himself from actor/playwright to sage/author, investigating what role (if any) the Bard should play today in grappling topics such as: Gender, Sexuality, Race, Religion, Truth, and Justice.

This course challenges perceptions that devotional literature in English is dry, conventional, or trite. The texts we will read show the huge diversity of literary approaches to God and the gods, prayer, and the human quest for meaning in the universe in the Christian era in England. We will read texts in which trees talk, dreamers travel to other worlds, and fairy tales and exotic myths break into the familiar and real. We will look at texts from the very beginnings of English literature (c. AD 650) all the way to fantastic writers like T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien in the 20th century. All texts in other languages than modern English will be read in translation.

In the four centuries since Shakespeare’s plays were first performed at The Globe theatre, his works have travelled to the farthest reaches of our globe. Shakespeare’s plays have long been labelled ‘universal’; the playwright has also long held the title of England’s ‘national poet’. Are these two characterizations in conflict? Does Shakespeare’s Englishness matter? Why has Shakespeare, more than any other playwright, transcended national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and borders? Looking towards these questions, this course will survey Shakespeare’s legacy on the stage and page, asking students to interrogate what it means to adapt or appropriate the plays in specific times, places, and cultural contexts. Across the semester students will read a selection of Shakespeare’s plays and engage with key adaptations and appropriations of them in text, art, film, and live performance. This course will allow students to develop their skills in critical discussion, analysis, close reading, and writing. Course work will include short writing assignments, an in-class presentation, a creative assignment, and a final research paper.

Many writers of the Early Modern period regularly include physically and mentally impaired characters in their poetry, prose, and plays. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were obsessed with portraying disability on the Elizabethan stage, and John Milton gives us poignantly moving poetry about his struggles with blindness; representations of disabled bodies and minds appear at every turn in the literature of the period. However, until very recently, almost no scholarship has considered the cultural, social, and material contexts of these early modern representations of disability. In this course, we will consider how and why early modern writing displays such an abiding anxiety about disability, paying close attention along the way to the materiality of disabled bodies and how the body itself shapes disability discourse. Through our inquiries, we will better understand how early modern texts both reflect and challenge modern ideas about disability and the human body.

King Arthur is perhaps the most well-known figure from medieval European lore. The sheer number of movies, TV shows, and books about Arthur and his court indicate a continued and flourishing interest in Arthurian legend. But what are these contemporary writers re-making? Who exactly was Arthur? The goal of this course is not to discover the “real,” historical Arthur (although this question will certainly arise during the semester), nor is it to find the most “accurate” source for the Arthurian legend. Rather, this course aims to explore Arthur from two different angles. First, we will examine some of the foundational medieval texts that discuss Arthur and his beloved Camelot: Chretien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romances and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Second we will use more modern works—such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Guy Ritchie’s film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017), and the short story collection Sword, Stone, Table (2021)—as springboards for discussing how and why people continue to write about Arthur. Although the course centers around Arthur’s character, we will of course discuss Guinevere, Merlin, Lancelot, and other residents of Arthur’s court throughout the semester."

What do “lovers” and “madmen” have in common? According to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s a shared diagnosis of lovesickness; what Theseus describes as “seething brains” that have become overwhelmed by romantic imagination. Tracing this phenomenon across English literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, our class will examine the history of lovesickness and its portrayals in poetry, drama, letters, and the novel. Over the course of the semester, we’ll discover how lovesickness interacts with broader thematic questions of romance, kinship, gender, religion, and power.

A cliché, a painful truth, an old story, a new one—this course explores alcohol and alcoholism in Irish literature, Irish society and Irishness, examining how alcohol infuses the stories Irish people tell and those told about them, and asking what happens if we take alcohol(ism) seriously as a framework and topic of analysis. We will think about the romance and conviviality of drink and drinking, pubs and wakes and more; and counterposed crusades against drinking (by Father Mathew and others), as well as the unromantic and destructive dimension so central to recent writing. We will think about alcohol(ism) in relation to political authority and nationalism, as well as in relation to colonial resistance, recalcitrance and recovery. We will ask how this "inheritance" travels into Irish America, and even to this campus, asking what legacies are being lived out, and why, and what we make of that. The course will feature a diverse set of texts across a span of Irish literary tradition, including medieval and contemporary, fiction and memoir, poetry and prose, verbal, visual and musical media. On the way students will work on their speaking, analytical and writing skills. Course work will include short writing assignments and analytical papers, a presentation, and a creative assignment.

In this fine arts course we will read full-length books by young Latinx poets. We will discuss and learn from the them as we aspire to create our own literary art, in tandem with fun assignments, including but not limited to: writing to music, using a text from another language to write our own in English or Spanglish, visiting the Snite Museum on campus to use the visual or plastic arts as a springboard for our own literary art. We will also read and discuss essays on the craft of writing. The Latinx writers we will be reading will also be guests at special sessions on ZOOM, during which we'll be able to question them about their art. Students will experience at least one literary event to experience literature as performance. Finally, students will practice and hone a certain vocabulary in order to offer constructive feedback to one another. No prior experience with creative writing necessary. All levels and majors and colleges welcome.

What do “lovers” and “madmen” have in common? According to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is a shared diagnosis of lovesickness; what Theseus describes as “seething brains” that have become overwhelmed by romantic imagination. Tracing this phenomenon across English literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, our class will examine the history of lovesickness and its portrayals in poetry, drama, mock-epic, letters, and the novel. Together, we will learn about how lovesickness in these texts interacts with broader thematic questions of romance, kinship, gender, religion, and power.

German philosopher Jurgen Habermas' "bourgeois public sphere" imagined an institution that briefly held sway in eighteenth century urban European societies. In sociable spaces, such as coffee-houses or taverns, men of different allegiances gathered to discuss politics and worldly affairs. While women have been assigned a marginal position in the story of European sociability, literary texts offer a different reality. What were women's sociable spaces? What did it mean for a woman to be "sociable"? What was her stake in politics and worldly affairs? We will discuss how women writers and fictional heroines were redefining what constituted "public" and "private" while conducting politics in a distinct register. Whether it was the actress on the English stage, aristocratic women in French salons, the Bluestockings, or novelistic heroines shopping in London - the literary story of women's sociability is one that needs telling. We will read texts from authors such as Madame de Lafayette, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf.

As a term in European cultural history, decadence most often indicates a late-nineteenth-century movement in which writers and artists provoked the respectable middle class with racy, sordid, overblown and/or absurdist subject matter and methods. This course explores that environment but also takes a broader view, examining alternative visions of decadence over the last two centuries and more, where decadence becomes one way of viewing secular modernity more generally. Our materials include fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy, visual arts, cinema and criticism. Early on, we lay conceptual groundwork with texts by Freud and Nietzsche. Well-known authors (in addition to Freud and Nietzsche) include Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, and Patrick Süskind. We also read several lesser-known authors and study films by Ken Russell, Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter. Please note that our discussion matter is not for the prudish or faint-hearted. Bring a tolerance for the grotesque and a readiness to think carefully about authors who deliberately challenge deeply held Western attitudes concerning morality and values. Assignments include two written exams (one or more in take-home format), an interpretive paper, and bi-weekly reflective writings.

“Have the courage to use your reason!” Immanuel Kant’s motto would have run into great difficulties in the age of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. For early modern and Enlightenment writers, the cultivation of reason, individual freedom, and the pursuit of secular methods of inquiry were key frameworks through which to envision a future for human society. These ideals—and the literary, cultural movements through which they were propagated— have left a complex legacy that continues to be explored in modern literature and media. Enlightenment ideals are viewed now by scholars both as the harbingers of modernity and as implicated in the realities of slavery, colonialism, and empire. Now, when we confront our own uncertain future— in a moment of war, impending climate catastrophe, and sweeping technological changes— this class proposes an engagement with the futures of the past. We’ll collectively develop strategies to “read for the future,” paying attention to issues such as the scope and limits of “human” intelligence and the relationship between humans and the natural world. The class will especially foreground historically marginalized perspectives such as those of women and people of color; readings will include works by Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shelley, Olaudah Equiano, Joseph Conrad as well as texts such as sci-fi films and episodes from the TV-series Black Mirror.

If the popular phrase, "well-behaved women seldom make history," holds true, then what forms of "bad behavior" have shaped the cannon of women's literature? How and why did particular women writers gain in acclaim and popularity as others faded from view? In this class, we will explore how the creation and violation of gender expectations has shaped nineteenth-century women's literature, its reception, and its modern reinterpretations. We will examine a wide range of literary figures, real and fictional alike, from pillars of propriety to unabashed rebels, from the nineteenth century and today. Readings will include work by Jane Austen, Anne Lister, Anne Bronte, Michael Field, Mary Seacole, and Virginia Woolf as well as contemporary television (Sally Wainwright's Gentleman Jack), graphic novels (Isabel Greenburg's Glasstown), and film (Park Chan-Wook's The Handmaiden).

James Cameron's Titanic, Netflix's The Crown, even Game of Thrones - our popular culture is saturated with stories based on the real events of the past, be they attempting "historical accuracy" or blending history with fiction and even fantasy. The tradition of creating compelling stories using the raw material of the past is an established one in human history. This course will explore this tradition in the context of the modern novel. We will begin with Walter Scott's Waverly, often cited as the first historical novel, and progress through a selection of major historical novels of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries, spanning three continents and six countries. As we read we will consider key questions respecting the relationship between history and historical fiction: What is the difference between historical narrative and fictional narrative? How can novels offer a different kind of perspective on history that "objective" history writing cannot? Why has historical fiction in many cases proven more impactful in shaping perceptions of the past than academic historical research? What is meant by "historical accuracy" and why do people care so much about it in fictional works? In the course of exploring these questions we will also consider broader issues of historical representation, such as the depiction of war, colonialism and national identity. At the heart of our course will be the matter of how we as individuals and as a society perceive our own and other's pasts, and what impact that perception has on our present.

The course will address the major poetic genres, a variety of poetic forms, and a range of literary concepts and devices. We will also spend some time thinking about the oral performance of poetry through different activities, including listening to recordings of poems and potentially attending a poetry reading. We will read a variety of material both past and contemporary, with a special emphasis on poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and particularly the Romantic period. We will try to understand why the poetry on our syllabus has spoken to readers over time, and to see how it might speak to us and about us.

While stories of falling in love and getting married have been told and retold throughout history, the mobility, technology, liberal theories, and modernizing economy of Victorian culture make Victorian marriage plots especially rich and strange. This class will explore the remarkable pressure put on stories of courtship and commitment in Victorian fiction, poetry, and prose. We'll examine how female writers try to reverse literary traditions which allow men to speak of love but require men to remain silent, and how male writers respond to new ideas about a less differentiated, more equal marriage partnership. We'll look at the literature shaped by the competing demands of Victorian domestic ideals, Victorian notions that companionate marriage was the best avenue to mature self-realization, and a persistent Victorian traditionalism that valued the practices of the past. We'll read plots of love, marriage, bigamy, divorce, artistic development, and vampires in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eye, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. We'll get to know newlyweds, prostitutes, princesses, nuns, madwomen, and the occasional goddess in poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Augusta Webster, Adelaide Procter, William Morris and Michael Field, always focusing on the questions of how literature addresses the problems troubling modern marriage, and how literature imagines new possibilities for human connection.

The British, crazy about Indian food and regarding chicken tikka masala as their “national dish”? The field sport cricket, invented in Britain, now closely followed in India and Pakistan while superseded in Britain by soccer/football? These odd but seemingly innocuous facts point to the rich and often quite dark history of British India. This history involves the development of British administrative and commercial governance by Britons in India and adjacent states, with origins as far back as the 1600s. We explore novels, short stories, and films treating the high-point of British-Indian power for Britons, around the 1880s, and follow through to its dissolution in 1947. We pay added attention to the aftermath of the Empire up to the present. Most of our reading materials are by British individuals who found themselves in British India and took to writing about it for a homeland marketplace with a taste for the “exotic.” We read some canonical authors--such as E.M. Forster with A Passage to India, George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling—and several less canonical authors. We also watch two modern Indian films set in British India and conclude with the Indian Salman Rushdie’s remarkable novel Midnight’s Children. Written work includes several short papers and regular (required but ungraded) reading journals.

This course introduces students to the Victorian short story (1830-1901). Areas of focus will include the history and development of the short story as prose fiction form, the print and publication market, and the many subgenres, such as the gothic tale, children's literature, the detective story, folklore, and science fiction. The short story is a distinctive lens through which to view the Victorian era's preoccupation with social, political, scientific, and moral issues. Through class discussions and written assignments, students will examine the formal and thematic qualities of the genre and develop their knowledge of the key debates of the Victorian period. Readings will include a variety of authors.

From the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the First World War, Britain was often a nation at war. In this course, we will explore British literature's engagements with this condition of warfare during the Long Nineteenth Century. In doing so, we will consider the ethical ramifications of representing violent conflict through literature - for instance, the tension between the desire to bear witness to suffering and the danger of aestheticizing it in the process. Significant attention will be given to analyzing how genres and forms - whether poetry, fiction, or memoir - differ in their approaches to representing warfare. These readings will range widely across time and place, taking us from the field of Waterloo, to the Siege of Lucknow, and into the trenches of the Western Front. Along the way, students will interrogate how literature shapes our understanding of these histories, experiences, and identities.

In this course we will examine a range of works that have been read by children. These include works like fables, folk and fairy tales, which are meant for both adults and children, and works written primarily with a child audience in mind (though almost always with a "dual address" which simultaneously acknowledges the adult as a potential reader and purchaser of the work). Though often assumed to be simple, works written for children often demonstrate considerable complexity, both in terms of their plots, and in terms of the moral and ethical questions they raise. In addition to dealing with complex issues, children's literature is a key site for transmitting cultural and social values. By reading children's literature critically, we can learn much about ourselves, our society and our culture; but by reading children's literature from other places and other times we can also understand the cultural values, attitudes and behaviors of other cultures, which can in turn expose the limitations and benefits of our own structures of thinking.

Ireland produced one of the most unique, extensive, and oldest literatures in Europe. In this class we look at a wide range of stories -- saints' lives, political poetry, myth and legend, heroic epic, lament, and placelore -- from ca. 800-1800 C.E. We learn about the changing religious, political, cultural and intellectual contexts to which these Irish women and men responded with their powerful compositions. We ask: what did Irish writers record about their conversion from paganism to Christianity? How did they use Gaelic poetry to protest invasion and English colonization? How did texts created by and about remarkable women like St. Brigit, the warrior-queen Medb, and the keening poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, address issues of gender and power in a heavily patriarchal Ireland? In this class we think about the transformative potential of words, and ask the question: what is literature, and how do we recognize and appreciate it? What defines Irish literature, and what has made it so politically and culturally dynamic? By looking at authors ranging from saints and scholars to dispossessed poets and grieving women, we examine the voices from Ireland's past that still speak to us today.

This course introduces students to the Gothic short story. Areas of focus will include the history and development of the short story as prose fiction form, the print and publication market, and the many subgenres. The short story is a distinctive lens through which to view gothic literature's preoccupation with social, political, scientific, and moral issues. Students will also develop an understanding of the formal and thematic qualities of the gothic short story as a genre. Readings will include a variety of Anglophone authors.

How do we think about the past? As a golden age we long to return to? Or a painful memory better off forgotten? Is it set in stone or open to revision? Together we'll read the novels, plays, and poetry of contemporary British and American authors who demonstrate just how crucial these questions can be. When, for example, books about slavery or the Holocaust are periodically banned from schools, it becomes clear that a) the past doesn't stay neatly behind us and b) people can find it difficult to cope with that. By studying literature, we can understand the stakes and implications of the various ways we currently cope with the persistent past, and develop a vision of how we might do better. In this writing intensive course you will produce a series of short analytical essays and a final creative project.

What do monsters tell us about our deepest desires? Why are fairytales both disturbing and enchanting? What do these stories reveal about the expanses of human experience? The Gothic is a genre of contradictions: entertaining and horrific, deathly and life-giving, sacred and profane. This is your chance to dive into the history of Gothic literature, from oral fairy tales through the contemporary Gothic. Within this tradition, we'll be considering how these stories use monsters to talk about marginalized identities, sexuality, and race. We'll take a look at works from the Grimms through Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu to Carmen Maria Machado. By the end of the course, you'll be able to connect Gothic themes of the past with the complexities of Gothic entertainment and media today. As a writing-intensive course, we'll pair our discussion of these texts with creative and analytical engagement through several short essays and a longer writing assignment.

Stories with animal characters have long been used to both entertain and to teach, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of novels written from "realistic" animal perspectives, against the backdrop of radical social, technological, and environmental changes. Works such as Black Beauty, Call of the Wild, and Watership Down were not only best-sellers that captivated readers of all ages, they were—and still are—part of vigorous debates about animal and human nature, ethics, and the real-world impact of art. In our conversations, papers, and if students choose, creative work, we will analyze novels from the perspectives of animals, as well as several screen adaptations, exploring the social and intellectual contexts of these works and engaging with the questions they raise, such as: How can a human portray a non-human point of view? To what extent are these works really about animals, as opposed to about ourselves? How have authors (intentionally or unintentionally) mapped some very human ideas about things like gender, class, and race onto their animal worlds? And how do readers respond to the pleasures and challenges of tales about other species?

This course will introduce students to representations of health and medicine in American fiction and non-fiction. We will discuss the history of medicine spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Civil War hospitals; critiques of segregation in health care; emerging questions of medical ethics; and the entanglements of gender, sexuality, and science. Throughout, we will ask how writers of fiction such as Louisa May Alcott, Frances Harper, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Charles Chesnutt, and Edith Wharton have responded to crucial moments in the history of medicine. We will also consider how medical and literary texts from the past speak to contemporary debates about health care in the twenty-first century. This course will involve class discussion and essay writing.

This course is an introduction, through English-language translations, to the Irish-language novel. We analyze key developments in the novel through a consideration of its literary-historical and critical contexts. Twentieth-century Ireland experienced a linguistic and cultural revival, and a corresponding literary development, especially as regards the novel. Emerging from cultural and political nationalism, novelists were, nonetheless, to the fore in analyzing and satirizing the official national narrative. We focus on this tension to guide our discussion. How did novelists respond to the revival and the creation of a devout conservation Catholic state built on traditional, rural values? A key question to be considered is how such novelists attend to contemporary issues such as socialism, evil, suicide, modernism, modernity, and postmodernism. Many of these texts are primary examples of different literary genres: the Bildungsroman, the Modernist novel, the parodic/satiric novel, the realist, and the naturalist novel. Throughout the course, we carefully consider thematic and formal questions related to the texts' genres. Authors studied may include, but are not limited to the following: Ó Laoghaire, Ó Conaire, Ó Grianna, Ó Cadhain, Mac Grianna, Standún, Ní Dhuibhne, and Wilmot. All texts are will be read in English translation. No prior knowledge of Irish is required. Extra credit is available to those undertaking research through the medium of Irish.

Ghosts, vampires, and things that go bump in the night have been a mainstay of popular cinema since the dawn of the moving picture, but this popularity has relegated the discussion of the otherworldly to the arena of pop-culture--draining it of any perceived political power. Still, major works of literature have always been haunted by the horrific, terrifying, and grotesque. Through online posts, short presentations, a research paper, and regular class discussions, this course will reconsider what we can learn about the material world of history and politics from the immaterial world of ghosts and spirits as depicted in literature. By progressing from early Victorian to post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, we will consider the influence of history on genre and form and how authors use the ghostly to grapple with the very material problems faced by themselves and their nation. We will be reading short stories, plays, and novels from both major and minor Irish authors (in English) while supplementing the literature with short critical works to help illuminate the context of the author and the theories needed to unpack the primary texts.

City-life can be a dizzying experience. From Aristotle to Bladerunner, art and philosophy have tried to engage with the city as a space in which physical, mental and political life takes unpredictable forms. While Aristotle placed the Greek polis at the centre of his philosophy, the twentieth century has seen the "metropolis" become one of the central ways in which we imagine the modern human condition. This course will chart the progress of thinking about the modern city, from its roots in the aesthetics of nineteenth century Paris, to contemporary treatments of the postmodern delirium of city-life in films like High-Rise and Cosmopolis. As we analyse graphic novels, poetry and film, we will conduct a survey of urban culture that explores different ways of navigating the city.

In our day C.S. Lewis is chiefly remembered as an apologist and writer of fiction for children, but in his own day he was a celebrated literary critic and scholar of the medieval imagination, who packed out auditoriums for his lectures on pre-modern literature. This course uses his lesser-known scholarly and critical writings to understand the enduring, hypnotic appeal of his fictional literature. We will read some of the works of literature he admired most (such as poems by Spenser, Dante); selections from Lewis's essays, sermons, critical writings, and lectures; as well as select poems, letters, and passages from his science fiction and "myths" for children.

The First World War, or the “Great War,” is one of the defining events of the Twentieth-Century that continues to grasp the public imagination. The unprecedented scale of devastation and mass casualty unleashed by this industrialized warfare was an unassimilable experience that many have sought to represent through different narrative and textual forms. This survey course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of literature that emerged from the Great War experience, including soldiers’ memoirs and trench poetry, auto-fictional writings by nurses, experimental literary texts, and letters by colonial soldiers. The goal is to examine how each text conveys a unique attempt to represent the experience of the Great War; how patterns and tropes of representation echo across groups of texts; and how these groups of texts then speak to one another. Our objective is to understand the Great War experience through a prismatic lens–examining how the unique experiences of different groups of participants in the Great War, like soldiers, medical personnel and civilians, are represented through different literary styles and genres, while also being sensitive to the connections between these styles and genres as they lend themselves to these different groups. We will examine how civilian-texts like Mrs Dalloway and The Return of the Soldier work in conversation with soldiers' trench-writings like Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, nurses' life-writings like The Forbidden Zone, and colonial war-fiction like Across the Black Waters. We will also spend time on the representation of the Great War in film by analyzing the cult-classic Lawrence of Arabia, and the Academy Award-winning 1917.

Celebrated the world over for the unprecedented breadth and depth of his fictional worlds, J.R.R. Tolkien is less frequently praised for the quality of his prose. Decried by many contemporary critics for his anachronistic style, flat characterization, and florid descriptions, it has only really been since the turn of the millennium that Tolkien’s esteem as the ingenious inventor of Middle-earth has begun to be mirrored by an improving reputation as a technically skilled writer. In this course, we will work our way chronologically through Tolkien’s Middle-earth oeuvre—his legendarium—in order of composition, from well-known texts such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to lesser known and posthumously published works ranging from The Silmarillion to the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, paying particular attention to how Tolkien curates his oft-derided yet oft-imitated writerly voice. In studying Tolkien’s writings, we will consider how Tolkien not only became the voice of his generation but continues to speak to audiences today.

While both liberal and conservative political commentators of the late 20th century promised capitalist globalization as the best solution for the political violences begotten by the nation-state, current political crises have repeatedly reaffirmed that the so-called “end of history” has not diminished the visibility or authority of the nation as a dominant political unit. In fact, in our contemporary marked by increasingly ascendant campaigns of military proliferation, economic protectionism, and anti-immigrant patriotism, it appears that the aggressive maintenance of nationhood has not dissipated and is as prevalent as ever. In Expats, Émigrés, Exiles, we will examine poetry, fiction, and film produced by writers known for international itinerancy, both in their art and in their personal lives. By reading and viewing media marked by transatlantic movement, this course will be well-positioned to ask “how did writers of the 20th and 21st centuries both reify the idea of the nation and refuse acquiescence to national identity?” We will track conceptions of national character from the early 20th century to the present. In a contemporary distinguished by political trends of rigid national demarcation, we seek to explore how poets, novelists, and filmmakers of the last century reinforced and complicated national identification.

Is it possible to think of the 21st century as a post-racial, post-feminist world? In her provocative 2012 study, Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, Janell Hobson suggests that rather than having been eradicated, millennial hopes that the historical difficulties represented by race and gender have lost their significance in the present day are as far, if not even further away from the mark as they have ever been. For Hobson, policing the body, whether that be in terms of its race, its gender, or its sexuality, has remained paramount. "[W]hile the early-twenty-first century discourse of 'postracial' and 'postfeminist' often declares the loss of meaning attached to race and gender," she argues, "..the global scope of our media-reliant information culture insists on perpetuating raced and gendered meanings that support ideologies of dominance, privilege, and power." In Hobson's view, the body and how it is imagined rests at the center of such ideologies, pointing also to a number of crucial questions that become particularly important when considering the significance of race and gender through the lens of modernity. How might a reconsideration of race point also to a rethinking of gender and vice-versa? What does race actually mean? How does/can it alter the way we understand gender? Is it possible to think race beyond the idea of race? What might a new conception of race actually look like, and how might this influence our thinking on gender? How are the problems of race and gender intertwined, and how is/has the body been imagined in and through them? What can such questions tell us about today's racial and gendered realities, both inside and outside the university, both in the past and the present? This course takes a step backward to investigate these and other like questions in the context of the utopic impulse and its emphasis on the imagination in several 19th-century American authors whose work may be viewed as participating in a broad yet under-acknowledged vision of race, gender and Atlantic modernity that seeks to interrogate hierarchies of race and gender as these have been constructed and maintained within dominant ideologies. Grounding our analysis in a number of 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century political philosophical texts on law and utopia and drawing on insights from critical race theory, gender studies, feminist theory, theories of law and literature, and utopian studies, our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of our racialized past and its troubled link to questions of gender both then and now, so that we may better hope to imagine - and reimagine - the shape of our collective democratic future in the 21st century's global community.

Historian Joanne Freeman calls Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton a piece of "revolutionary theater." Freeman's characterization suggests two ideas: (1) that Hamilton represents a milestone and turning point in theater as a form and (2) that Hamilton is part of an identifiable body of drama dealing with the American Revolution. While these two ideas may seem contradictory, this course works with the hypothesis that both are true. Beginning with the pamphlet plays of the 1770s and ending with Hamilton, this course explores plays and musicals that dramatize the figures and events of the American Revolution. What histories do these pieces stage, and what do they omit? What are some commonalities in the plays' content, structure, and characterization, and how has this tradition of theater evolved from the tragedies of Mercy Otis Warren to the postmodern comedy of Will Eno, or from the traditional "Broadway" sound of 1776 to the hip-hop of Hamilton?

Proposing a broad definition of "horror," this course features authors often associated with grisly topics, such as Hawthorne and Poe, yet it also highlights nonfiction accounts of horrific experience, such as those by Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs. The course also explores terrifying imagery in the sermons of Jonathan Edwards and the Civil War poetry of Whitman. Ultimately, this course invites us to query the effectiveness of horror, fear, and the like as literary techniques. Why do we enjoy these texts (or not)? What is their effectiveness on readers' engagement and authors' persuasiveness? Moreover, what do these authors suggest as the sources of horror, and how do we address them as literary critics?

In this course we will consider the ways in which women writers shaped social, political, and religious dialogue from the British colonial period to the 21st century in North America. Taking up Abigail Adams' charge to "Remember the Ladies," we will ask how American women writers took up the mantle for social change, adapting and inventing literary tools to fit their reforming interests. We will explore a variety of genres from personal poetry to political declarations, considering how women writers over the course of three centuries both unsettled and reenforced systems of social hierarchy and inequality, applying the questions these reformers asked to our own present-day experiences. Throughout our reading, writing, and class discussions, we will continually return to the guiding questions of the course: In what ways do women writers complicate, dismantle, or otherwise reinscribe systems of inequality in early America? And what can we, in our twenty-first-century context, learn from them?

What can American literature before the 20th century teach us about the nation and the world? In this class we will explore America's literary imaginary and its intellectual pleasures and difficulties. How did early American literature teach us to pay attention and think critically? What are the stakes of "mis-reading" for the average citizen? To answer these questions, we will move from text (close-reading) to context (broader geopolitical history) and in so doing uncover the relationship between the private crises of reading and the public crises of nationhood, between fraught interiorities and fraught interpretations of liberalism, that constitute American literature since its inception. The writers and works we will study include: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others. Primary texts will be supplemented with appropriate secondary readings from social science, art history, and philosophy that help students become better writers and thinkers who can tackle the perils and conundrums of our current world historical moment.

In this course, we will examine the role of labor in American literature from the decades before the Civil War to the late 20th century through the critical lens of Audre Lorde's theorization of the erotic. Through this theorization, Lorde identifies the intimate and varying relationships to power that are revealed when gender identity, race, sexuality, and class intersect with labor in U.S. American culture. We will critically examine what these classed, gendered, and raced aspects of labor reveal about American culture, ideology, identity, and future trajectories. We will interrogate, reflect, and deconstruct how writers affirm, challenge, and negotiate identity and conceptualize American society through representations of labor.

For the last five centuries, American literatures have reflected diverse and changing relationships between people and their environment. Scholars in human geography and other fields call this a sense of place, our "sixth sense." In some instances, sense of place is so strong, so deeply imbued with meaning, that it becomes a part of individual or cultural identity, such as one's childhood home, famous historical landmarks, fictional landscapes, and even Notre Dame's campus. This course explores the many ways American writers have represented senses of place—and senses of being displaced, or of placelessness—in literary prose. What does it mean to belong to a place? How does connection to place impact specific literary traditions? What is our responsibility to place, and how might notions of place help us understand diverse people and cultures? We'll consider these questions throughout the term in class discussions and in formal papers, and students will explore their own sense of place in regular informal writing assignments.

The world is ending, and, surprisingly, has ended multiple times throughout history. Terrible events have occurred, and are occurring as we move through climate change, the Covid pandemic, and international wars. Yet, in the moment of apocalypse that, as James Berger notes, “burns away layers of habits of perception,” our perception is made anew and we begin to create new histories, narratives, and futures through the debris of trauma. This course will look into literary and cinematic representations of apocalypse that reflect, annihilate, revolutionize, or reconfigure the economic, social, demographic changes in US society. We will begin by discussing how (post)apocalyptic narratives reinforce the traditional binaries of Global North and South, self and other, by illustrating contact with the non-white race – both physical and psychological - as “the End.” We will then move on to see how other writers like Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzaldua rework this genre as they revisit the traumatic sites of history to identify the cultural symptoms and allow the unmourned ghosts to speak.

In this course, we will examine writers who engage ghosts, haunting, and the supernatural to explore how oppressive systems of power, though pervasive, are rendered imperceptible due to their historical persistence. We will unpack how writers engage with ghosts and the supernatural to interrogate issues of power, gender, race, sexuality, and class. We will critically examine what these classed, gendered, and raced intersections reveal to us about American culture, ideology, history, identity, and future trajectories. We will interrogate, reflect, and deconstruct how writers affirm, challenge, and negotiate identity and conceptualize American society through their engagement with ghosts.

If you visit any major city in the United States (and beyond), ghost tours are perennially one of the most popular tourist attractions, whether equipped with spooky, mist-decaled buses or bloody-faced period costumed walking guides. Why does this delightful and disturbing tourist trap thrive in so many locations? Perhaps the best way to understand any person, any place, and culture is to understand their dead. In Haunting: Page, Stage, and Screen, we will examine haunting as a method of representing grief, loss, systemic violence, and survival in spite of all that. By reading haunting across genres of prose, drama, and film, we will consider how metaphors of haunting function as an orientation to the past across mediums and cultural contexts. Does be haunting mean the same thing in different historical moments and geographical locations? What kinds of haunting are made available on the page, on the stage, or on the screen? Can a text or a person be haunted even without a ghost? Beginning with Hamlet (one of the earliest and most important literary ghosts), we will trace haunting to the present. Ultimately, by thinking critically about haunting, we hope to learn a little about living.

For the last five centuries, American literatures have consistently drawn from and reacted to the continent's diverse, dynamic environments. Today, however, "nature" and all that we associate with it seem fundamentally different. This course examines the tradition of United States nonfiction nature writing in light of what Bill McKibben calls the "end of nature, - or the end of nature as we know it. We'll begin with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities, and then students will encounter some of the most significant literary voices associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century environmentalism. After the midterm, we'll turn to more contemporary literary nonfiction and the wicked problems of the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. For example, what does "nature" look like today, especially from the lens of a university with a national and global reach? What does environmentalism look like in the face of widespread human migration, globalization, and climatic instability, and how do ideas of race, class, ethnicity, and gender become entangled in environmental thinking? What can nature writing offer us in the Anthropocene? Students will consider such questions throughout the term, both in class discussions and in written assignments.

Despite the growing presence of Central Americans in the United States in the last four decades, Central America and its people have occupied a paradoxical presence in the popular U.S. imaginary. As noted by literary scholar Yajaira Padilla, they are hypervisible as “threatening guerillas,” undocumented migrants, domestic workers, and “gang-bangers,” yet their lived experiences remain illegible in the dominant culture. This course traces the literary and cultural narratives of Central American experience within and in relation to the United States. We read fiction, poetry, film, literary nonfiction, theater, performance art, and music alongside literary and cultural studies scholarship. We begin by anchoring ourselves in key scholarship of U.S. Central American literary and cultural studies and the travel narratives of those who “witnessed” Central America in the mid 19th century. We fast-forward to writers from the U.S. and Central America who witnessed and experienced the effects of U.S. imperialism in the region, from the making of the Panama Canal to Cold War-era military interventions. We then focus on the creative narratives of Central American diasporas from the 1990s to the present. We cover works by and about Central Americans from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama, as well as Garífuna and Maya territories.

The course explores twentieth and twenty-first century labor in the U.S. from historical, literary, and theological perspectives, and is designed at the 20xxx-level to attract a broad range of students. Our historical study of labor questions and movements will pay particular attention to the evolution of labor unions and their political challenges and impact, but we will also look at laborers outside the sphere of organized labor (domestic workers and other non-union workers), as well as the persistence of and challenges to racialized and gendered identities that long segmented labor markets and restricted some from unions. Throughout these historical explorations, we will spend significant time visiting the life stories of select individuals (often in their own words), foregrounding the tangible intersectional nature of work and the politics of work, and showcasing the importance of family, community, solidarity, and faith in many labor activists' own careers. A mix of Catholic and non-Catholic perspectives might include Samuel Gompers, Terrence Powderly, Jane Addams, John Ryan, Florence Kelley, Rose Schneiderman, Pauli Murray, Dorothy Day, George Higgins, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther, George Meany, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Mary Kay Henry, and Rich Trumka. Alongside our historical readings, we will probe the representation of labor, laborers, and class differences in literary works - short stories, novels, and plays - by writers whose own class and ethnic backgrounds vary widely, using the tools of close reading and historicist criticism. Our reading list will highlight Catholic writers such as J. F. Powers, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, and Lolita Hernandez, but for comparison will also include works by well-known figures such as Frederick Douglass, Jack London, Tillie Olsen, and John Steinbeck. As we analyze literary works, we will pose questions about aesthetics and canon formation: What narratives most provocatively explore work? Why are some labor activists attracted to experimental forms while others insist on social realism? Can a worker's speech or diary or song "count" as literature? All our historical and literary readings will intersect with our readings in CST, ranging from Pope Leo XIII's papal encyclical on labor, Rerum Novarum, to Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, to John Ryan's A Living Wage, to Monsignor George Higgins' lifetime of engaged scholarship. The tenets of Catholic teaching about labor will inform all our discussions about historical events and literary representations. We will also ask students to explore the Higgins Labor Program's new Just Wage Framework and Online Tool, considering ways that historical and literary approaches to "just wage"; questions might inform this multistakeholder tool rooted in CST and designed to encourage employers, workers, advocates, policymakers, and community groups to discern, dialogue, and debate policies that promote a Just Wage.

This literature course offers an opportunity to read, discuss, and write about a generous sampling of contemporary American poetry by living Latinx poets, utilizing as its principal text the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. There will also be a special module on Latinx poetry inspired by Latinx art, with particular attention to the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibit: "Our America: the Latino Presence in American Art." We will also be relying significantly on a series of online resources, including video interviews with Latinx poets conducted here at Notre Dame. We will focus mainly on mid-career writers, discovering and examining some of the themes that characterize Latinx poetry. A number of the poets who we'll be reading will be special guests, via ZOOM, at various points during the semester: we'll get to ask them questions, and watch and hear them read some poems. We'll also encounter poems that challenge what one might expect when one hears the term, "Latinx poetry."

American poets have long used their poetry to speak truth to power, writing against war, racialized injustice, gender and income inequality, and the climate crisis. Figuring themselves as spokespoets for the nation, many see this kind of writing as prophetic work. But what is the nature of prophecy in American poetry? What do prophetic poets sound like, and what kind of poems do they write? How do we know a prophet when we hear one? In this course, students will explore the various traditions of prophetic poetry in the U.S., applying theories from the Black prophetic tradition, Jewish and feminist criticism, and others. Readings include American poets from the nineteenth century through the present day, including: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Kaveh Akbar, and others. At the end of the semester, students will research social protest poetry relating to a cause of their choice, and propose an addition to the syllabus, arguing for their own definition of what makes an American poet a prophet.

Coronavirus in China, wildfires in Australia, locusts in East Africa, melting poles, rising seas, the insect armageddon, the sixth extinction, droughts and floods of Biblical proportion ... Welcome to the "End of Nature" and the beginning of the Anthropocene! For just when we're being told that "Nature" is at an end, nature seems to be everywhere, invading our headlines and intruding into our lives in sudden and unexpected ways. Not long ago, we could still think of nature as a peaceful retreat from the stress and din of society, a resource for healing, and a refuge from the traumas of history-whether it be an afternoon's gardening, a day hike nearby, a weekend fishing trip, or a summer's outing to a faraway National Park. But that was the nature of the Holocene, the geological epoch that, according to the latest science, ended as recently as the 1950s. Today, in the Anthropocene, nature is roaring back into our lives and shaking the very pillars of our society-as if The End of Nature, in Bill McKibben's 1987 book title, were more truly the end of the world. But perhaps what this panic tells us is that our world has always been intertwined with nature, both actually and conceptually, in ways we have forgotten to remember, ways that the current revolt of nature is forcing us to confront. This course will inquire into the strange ways that modernity has, over the last 200 years, modified and transformed our notions of Nature, even as our technological explosion has leveraged the power of humanity from regional to planetary scales. This course, therefore, travels from the Holocene of our recent literary heritage to the Anthropocene within which we are all living today-although only some of our literature explicitly takes up this fact. Altogether we are now left with one great question, as we look toward our future: Since we can't survive without nature, how can we learn to survive with it? Readings will be drawn from poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, from Emerson and Thoreau, through American "Naturalism" and such "nature writers" as Aldo Leopold and Annie Dillard, to the recent writings of Jeff Vandermeer, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez and Richard Powers. Along the way we will be guided and provoked by such philosophers and theorists as Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh. Students will write two short papers and one longer paper involving research as well as personal observation and reflection.

Knowledge presents itself in many forms. And it is the very shape of this form which perhaps gives us the greater part of the information. It has long been said that form and content must mesh for there to be beauty and inspiration. The books here are housed in the area called Literature, and thus it is the written word which is the chosen outer form. But, within that box are many varied elements which each give their own spirit to the work. They do that by squeezing the essence of their meaning into a certain shape or form which in itself creates much of the meaning of the artistic work. Potential books: Washington Square - Henry James (1880); Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - Stephen Crane (1893); The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (1820); The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925); A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith (1943); A Walker in the City - Alfred Kazin (1951); A Fairytale of New York - J.P. Donleavy (1973); Billy Bathgate - E. L. Doctorow (1990).

Many places of worship hang a sign of invitation: All Are Welcome! But what happens when an aspect of an individual's identity or beliefs comes into conflict with their religious community? Which differences are tolerated, and which are shunned? Who belongs, and who is cast out? From Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories to Kendrick Lamar's hip hop albums, the American literary imagination has long been interested in examining the conflicts between identity - race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability - and religion. Together we will read a variety of American literature, including poetry, science-fiction, drama, and literary essays, paying attention to religious outcasts, misfits, and minoritized peoples as they search for belonging within established communities, or attempt to forge new spaces for themselves. Readings will include James Baldwin, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Kushner, Octavia Butler, more contemporary writing by Molly McCully Brown and R.O. Kwon, as well as music, film, and podcasts.

Nature isn't what it used to be: the Arctic is melting, seas are rising, forests are burning, and the planet is heating up. How do we understand the human relation to nature in a time of ecological catastrophe? This writing-intensive course introduces students to key ideas in the environmental humanities, including nature writing, deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, sustainability, and deep adaptation.

The Earth's climate is changing faster than expected. Industrialization, fossil fuel use, consumption, and exploitation are radically transforming the planet we live on. In "Witnessing Climate Change," we work to make sense of the science behind this planetary crisis and practice writing about it for the public. This is a large, writing-intensive, public-facing course that engages key contemporary issues and core ways of knowing from a values-oriented perspective, through large lectures and small group workshops. Readings include Jeff VanderMeer, Nukariik, Barry Lopez, Aldo Leopold, Wanda Coleman, J.M. Coetzee, and St. Francis, among others. Find out more at witnessingclimatechange.nd.edu. Please note: for this class students are required to sign up for a discussion section (ENGL 22760).

US literature and popular music between the mid-19th century and the end of World War II. We will read key works of American prose (as well as some poetry) from the period's principal literary movements, including realism, naturalism, modernism, and multimedia documentary. We will also listen to musical works--Broadway tunes and blues songs, spirituals and symphonies. We'll pay particular attention to how segregation and other racial politics, changing roles for women, and the mass production of commodities influenced the art of this period. Texts will include writing by Stephen Crane, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Harriet Jacobs, and Edith Wharton, as well as music by George M. Cohan, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Paul Robeson, and Bessie Smith. Course requirements will include two essays, presentations, and active participation in online and in-class discussions.

Gazes are gravitational forces. They can erect and deconstruct identities, ideologies, and geography. This course investigates the ideological tensions that inform the gaze and how this gravitational force is experienced, produced, enforced, and reimagined by marginalized beings. It also reevaluates the gaze itself; we will examine the gaze within cinema, as a form of self-expression, institutional power, and a critical lens through which to question our looking practices. We will investigate how nationalism, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class produce gazes while examining alternative gazes that envision an elsewhere. Context will guide our discussion as we consider how gazes are enforced within family, work, and political structures. Throughout the semester, students will research various interdisciplinary approaches to the gaze, consider their personal looking practices, and create a gaze of their own. This course takes an intersectional approach to the gaze; possible texts include La Llorona, Lilo & Stitch, and poetry by Alan Pelaez Lopez and Larry Mitchell.

This course explores various 20th and 21st century writers engaged in the work of civil disobedience and protest of all kinds.

How has science fiction blurred the boundaries of human existence and identity? Prominent Sci-fi author Octavia Butler once stated, "I was attracted to Science Fiction because it was so wide open I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining." What about the genre makes it free of these "walls" Butler speaks of? This course will seek to answer this question through exploration of 20th and 21st century speculative works like Tracy Smith's Life on Mars, Octavia Butler's Bloodchild, famous essays like Sam Delany's "Racism and Science Fiction", and Marvel's 2018 Black Panther film. Students will develop an understanding of how various writers have redefined Science Fiction by way of aesthetic movements like Afrofuturism, tourge readers to develop nuanced understandings of identity and futures of endless possibility.

When discussions of modernism and modernity focus on the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, they also often center on those qualities of the movement described in the work of early modernist literary critics, such as Harry Levin or Edmund Wilson. Such examinations emphasized the modern movement's ehperiments in form, structure, linguistic representation, characterization, etc., while paying much less attention to the role of the modernist movement in the larger context of a given culture. In this course, we will explore the significance of the modern movement from the perspective of specifically American culture, as well as the manner and meaning of American literary participation in the movement. To that end, we will consider not only the work of authors generally accepted as American modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway; we will also consider the role of authors such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, whose work bridges the late 19th-century and the modernism of the early 20th-century, and Theodore Dreiser , of the early Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925), as well as a number of authors from the Harlem Renaissance - all authors the consideration of whose work enlarges and expands traditional conceptions of American modernism. Along the way, we will examine pertinent issues such as social class, social mobility, gender relations, progressivism, primitivism, race and ethnicity, immigration, cosmopolitanism vs. regionalism, and the importance of the vernacular, especially as these inform the question of "Americanness" and its role in our understanding of American literature during this time. The overarching goal of our exploration will be the effort to arrive at a much more comprehensive, more nuanced perspective on the meaning and significance of the modern in American culture. In exploring these different vanatage points in American literary modernity, we will seek to reimagine the contours of the modern in the American context from the perspective of "American modernisms," while drawing important conclusions about their significance within the larger modernist context.

Lifelong Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks once said of her Bronzeville home, "If you wanted a poem, you had only to look out of a window." This "life in the raw" that inspired the Pulitzer-winning poet also spoke to generations of writers and poets. What can the writing of Chicago, a place proud of its diversity but dogged by inequities, tell us about race and citizenship? And what does it mean to talk about the literature(s) of a city? We'll tackle these big questions as we learn about the 1893 World Fair; the Chicago Renaissance; the Black Arts Movement; the Latino Arts Movement; and Chicago's contemporary literary scene. Through discussion, several short writing assignments, and a longer, research essay, we'll sharpen our analytical and writing skills and seek to become lucid readers of Chicago's literary landscape.

The Black Panther movie franchise has intensified popular and scholarly interest in Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. To better understand the significance of this phenomenon, we will trace the literary traditions that made these films possible. We will start with genre-bending works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and Ishmael Reed among other African American authors. Before we end the semester by watching both Black Panther films, we will also discuss other multimedia texts that challenge normative scifi narratives. By the end of the semester, students will have a better understanding of how Black speculative writing has indeed shaped science fiction as we know it today. Students from all majors are welcome.

A study of Black American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, this course will focus on emerging and diverging traditions of writing by African Americans. We shall also investigate the changing forms and contexts of “racial representation” in the United States. In addition to primary texts, the course will also engage critical responses to these works.

As competing narratives of "Americanness" split the country, the literature of the past can help us interrogate the present, cultivate curiosity and care, and inhabit painful uncertainty. In this introductory undergraduate course, we will explore the call and response between slave narratives and their modern/contemporary afterlives in African American literature. Examining the strategies formerly enslaved people used to navigate the surveilled forms of English literature, we will ask: how did African-descended people claim space for themselves as authors, strategically manipulating literary forms that erased their complex selfhood? How do their writings configure relationships to land and kin? Turning to “neo slave narratives,” we will explore many reasons modern and contemporary authors look to the past: the need for literary ancestors, for deeper contexts of racial violence, and for fugitive strategies to survive in the present. How do their reinventions of specific slave narratives navigate these longings and the frustrating opacities of a slim and manipulated archive? How do their formal inventions and imaginative remembering invite us to inhabit the histories we carry within us? Some author pairings include: Phillis Wheatley Peters and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison, Harriet Jacobs and Toni Morrison, Henry “Box” Brown and Tyehimba Jess, and others.

“What if we stun existence one more time?” writes Ayisha Siddiqa, Pakistani poet and water justice activist. As oceans heat and acidify, floods wipe out coastal populations, and polluted rivers poison communities, what will it take to literally transform the global relationships—colonial, raced, gendered, and classed—that have wreaked such destruction? Throughout this course, we will investigate how poems contain and spill ways of imagining these relationships. As we dive into the geopolitical, mythic, and ritual histories of the contemporary water crisis, we’ll examine how poems compose water, and how water composes poems–that is, how metaphors and media create and flood one another. We’ll begin the course with poems, news reports, podcasts of contemporary indigenous “water protectors,” and jump back to the primordial waters of various creation myths and flood narratives. From there, we’ll trace the emergence of global oceanic networks in the Early Modern period in courtly sonnets and Middle Passage testimonies. Animal migrations, human eroticism, and interreligious forms of prayer collect in verse at the end of the course. Assignments will include a writing journal, a podcast or experimental sound project, and a final paper.

What does twenty-first century life look like? In this course, we’ll engage with recent novels from around the world taking on questions of migration, ecological change, postcoloniality, and some knottier systems and emotions we might not have ready categories for. Genres will range from speculative fiction to postmodern literary fiction to unconventional psychological realism. Finally, we’ll see how these works intersect with newer media forms like film and television, social media, and video games. Novels might include Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake; Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend; Elif Batuman, The Idiot; Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories; Maya Binyam, Hangman; Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer.

At the forefront of every social justice movement, you will also find poets; I contend that is evidence that they have something to teach us about the long labor for justice. In this class, we will read Peace Studies Theory alongside poets from around the globe who are deeply engaged in various struggles for peace—from Palestine-Israel, to Ukraine, to Afghanistan, to El Salvador, to Nicaragua, to Cuba, to Colombia, to Civil Rights and Indigenous Rights in the US. As an introduction course, this class requires no prior knowledge of poetry or peace studies theory, but rather, will lay the ground work for how to critically use both for the sake of building a fairer, more just world, all the while growing as writers and readers.

In this course, students will encounter a variety of popular literary texts and films that may be described as charming, adorable, folksy, kitschy, girly, boyish, or even geeky. The disarming triviality of these modes of aesthetic presentation can often obscure competing motives that blur the lines between popular media objects and propaganda literature. At the same time, the frivolousness and seeming insignificance of literary forms such as little poems, comic books, zines, chick-flicks, or fantasy novels can be deployed to resist mainstream aesthetics or normative politics. This course explores how gender, race, and class intersect with the construction of genres to influence how literary works are produced, marketed, read, and critiqued. In this course, we will examine the historical and material conditions that influenced the production of genres or forms of literature. We will understand how these forms came to be labelled as aesthetically trivial, analyse how individual works conform with or subvert expectations of genre, and evaluate the impact of trivialisation on how we read these texts as the forms continue to develop. All reading and viewing material will be made available on Canvas or through the Hesburgh Library.

Considering the contemporary rise in the aesthetics of the genre of black horror, this course will explore literary and artistic horror(s) that black artists examine in America. We will work to study how black horror reminds us of the power of crafting narratives in America. We will be watching numerous horror films and shows and reading numerous literary authors. We will be reading and working with authors like: Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and many others. A close observation of this genre will allow us to question what constitutes horror and how is it connected to the humanities, law, and elements of science as well? This course is designed to help you build sound critical arguments and analysis by writing multiple genres of essays like a narrative essay, a close analysis essay, a podcast essay, and a final research essay.

In 1516 Sir Thomas More’s Utopia founded a new literary genre: utopian literature. Since then, many different versions of utopia have been imagined in both fiction and non-fiction literature. But where do queer and disabled people fit into these utopias? Too often, they don’t fit at all. Over the years, however, a few radical authors have envisioned the seemingly impossible: a utopia for the queer and disabled—a criptopia. In this course, we will engage with a variety of criptopian texts, using queer, crip, and disability theory to inform our pursuit of questions such as, What happens to the queer and disabled in traditional utopias? What defines a criptopia? How would our society have to change to become a criptopia? And is a truly inclusive utopia even possible, or do utopias necessarily create outsiders? At the end of the semester, students will put these questions to the test by designing their own inclusive utopias/criptopias. Can you envision a utopia with no outsiders?

In this introductory course, we will approach poetry through its strangest outliers: verbal collages, redacted scripts, typographic messes, and pages strewn with abandoned letters. Focusing on movements in contemporary poetry, we will examine the ways artists visually experiment with words in a strategic refusal to represent the unrepresentable: historical erasure and censorship, environmental extraction, social processes of gendered racialization, and even ecstatic encounters with the divine. We will explore the ways these poems, though apparently nonsensical, not only dramatize historical scenes but also open new paths for interpreting them. Authors will include Douglas Kearney, Susan Howe, M. NourbeSe Philip, Layli Long Soldier, Anne Carson, Asiya Wadud, Nicole Sealey, Emily Dickinson, and others.

Co-requisite discussion section for ENGL 20192 lecture

Corequisite discussion session for ENGL 20624

This is the discussion session for Witnessing Climate Change (ENGL 20760), thus, enrollment in both ENGL 22760 and ENGL 20760 (Or JED 30144) is required.

This course is for undergraduate teaching fellows of Witnessing Climate Change (ENGL 20760). In this course we'll work collaboratively to think through the practical, theoretical, institutional, philosophical, political, and ethical aspects of addressing climate change through writing and teaching writing.

Self-Writing Foucault describes self-writing as writing that “transforms the things seen or heard into tissue and blood.” Our own self-writing practice will begin with a close reading of Augustine’s Confessions, which will be our guide as we build a reflective journaling practice rooted in both our everyday experiences and meditation on reading. Drawing on the material from these journals, we will then have the opportunity to workshop longer pieces in autobiographical, memoiristic, epistolary, and autofictional forms. Readings from Gertrude Stein, Clarice Lispector, Georges Perec, Fernando Pessoa, Kathy Acker, and Virginie Despientes will help us in these experiments. While the writing in this course will predominantly take the form of creative nonfiction, writers of all disciplines should enjoy the opportunity to play with authorial voice.

We face worldwide ecological catastrophe, accelerating global warming, and political upheaval: this is the Anthropocene. What problems does the Anthropocene pose to narrative? What storytelling skills and rhetorical strategies do journalists, scientists, memoirists, bloggers, and philosophers need in order to adequately address and communicate about the epochal crisis we all face? Through journalism, essays, and other media, this course will explore the question - in practice - of what it means to write the Anthropocene.

This course explores the phenomenon of Shakespeare and film, concentrating on the ranges of meaning provoked by the conjunction. We shall be looking at examples of films of Shakespeare plays both early and recent, both in English and in other languages, and both ones that stick close to the conventionalized and historicized conceptualizations of Shakespeare and adaptations at varying degrees of distance toward the erasure of Shakespeare from the text. The transportation of different forms of Shakespearean textualities (printed, theatrical, filmic) and the confrontation with the specificities of film produce a cultural phenomenon whose cultural meanings - meanings as Shakespeare and meanings as film - will be the subject of our investigations. Students will be required to view screenings of films on a regular basis during the semester. Note: this course is delivered fully online. The course design combines required live weekly meetings online with self-scheduled lectures, problems, assignments, and interactive learning materials. To participate, students will need to have a computer with webcam, reliable internet connection, and a quiet place to participate in live sessions. Cannot have taken: FTT 40600 , FTT 44600, FTT 60600

This course provides beginning English majors with experience in the analysis, interpretation, and appreciation of literary works of different kinds and eras. Texts assigned will vary from one section to another, but all sections will include significant attention to poetry, as well as treatment of at least one other genre (fiction, drama, non-fiction prose). Frequent writing about works studied will introduce students to the practice of critical argument and consideration of how to read criticism as well as literature critically.

In this class, students will learn about the beginnings of English literature, starting with the first surviving piece of literature written in English, Caedmon's hymn. No prior knowledge of medieval or early modern languages or literature is expected. Texts will be drawn from different genres, including riddles, lyric, epic poetry, drama, allegory, and romance. Readings will include Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Julian of Norwich's Revelation, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Winter’s Tale, and Milton's Paradise Lost. There will be several short paper assignments, passage analyses, and quizzes, but no midterm or final exam.

In this course we will read a rich variety of British literature from the end of the 17th century to the present – a sweeping period that includes some extraordinarily dynamic phases of literary and cultural history. During these centuries, phenomena that are now so familiar to us – individualism, consumerism, industrialism, mass publishing, and social debates about gender, class, childhood, and education – were being defined and gaining increasing influence in English society. These developments, together with such major historical events as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, World War I, and World War II, helped to define key aspects of what we now think of as “modern” life. Our course will examine the many ways that British literature of this period reflects these historical and cultural conditions. We will read a variety of poetry and prose genres, taking in a span of authors running from the first Poet Laureate of England (John Dryden) to the current one (Simon Armitage), and including, among others, Jonathan Swift, William Blake, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Zadie Smith, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

"Nations are narratives" - so our historians tell us. That means the voices of a nation's artists and writers help to tell us who we are, even to create our very identity as a nation. So what are the narratives of our nation, the United States? This course traces the emergence of what we now know as "America" from the small and struggling British colonies of Virginia and New England, founded early in the 1600s on lands cultivated for millennia by Native Americans. We will consider the early "contact zones" in which settler societies from Europe met and mingled with indigenous Native American cultures, languages, and literatures; the institution of slavery as the foundation of American economies, and the growing contributions of free and enslaved African-Americans to the development of a distinctive American voice and literary tradition; and the literature of the American Revolution that established the United States as an independent nation. Finally, we will conclude with several works from the American Renaissance that characterize an emerging modern American literary tradition.

In this course, we will study landmark literary works published in the United States from 1865 to the present. You can think of this class as a survey in “American literature,” but as we explore the different movements and diverse traditions sometimes collected under that name, we’ll discover writers probing themes of identity and social belonging in ways that challenge and reimagine the idea of “Americanness" itself. As a community of close readers, we’ll consider how the habits of thought and feeling enacted in novels, short stories, poems, and essays can lead us to remake our sense of the past, and stake claims for collective futures. Throughout the course, we’ll also keep front and center the historical contexts that give rise to literary achievements, from the massive population shifts that stirred up literary renaissances in Harlem and Chicago, to the liberation movements of the 1960s that set the tempo for contemporaneous revolutions in literary style. We'll conclude the semester by making some expert judgments about what's happening today in U.S. literature, and some informed predictions about its future. Our authors may include Henry James, Edith Wharton, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Claude McKay, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison.

The English Romantic poet William Blake declared, "Poetry Fetter'd, Fetters the Human Race." This course explores this idea by providing an opportunity for students to deepen their understanding and appreciation of the power of poetic language - whether that is the power to "unfetter" perception and release the reader's mind into new understanding; the power to inspire social, cultural, or political change; or the power to give rich expression to fundamental human truths and experiences. This course is intended for English majors who are seeking additional foundation in and experience with the study of poetry, while also completing distribution requirements within the major. It is also intended for non-majors who would enjoy fulfilling Core Curriculum designations (LIT and WRIT) through a course on poetry. As we move through the semester, we will always be working to strengthen the ability to read poetry carefully and critically, form strong interpretations, and argue for those interpretations persuasively in both classroom discussion and writing. We will address the major poetic genres, a variety of poetic forms, and a range of literary concepts and devices, reading poems both individually and in groupings. The kinds of groupings we will study include poems that have been deliberately paired, including parodies; poems that are part of a particular volume; and poems clustered by poet. We will spend time thinking about the oral performance of poetry through different activities, including listening to recordings of poems, and thinking about the relationship between poetry and the image through works that engage with both media. We will read a variety of material, focusing especially on British and American poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also some contemporary poetry. Over the course of the semester we will try to understand why the poetry on our syllabus has spoken to readers over time, and how it might speak to us and about us.

This course will examine the translation of the sacred on the Island of Ireland. It will offer an introduction to translation theory, examining many of the key issues linked to the translation of the sacred texts in a global context before turning its attention to the Irish context. Central to the course will be the translation of the bible into the Irish language, known as Bedel’s bible, undertaken at the behest of Queen Elizabeth the 1. It will examine how translation lay at the heart of the colonial project. Other topics examined will be the issue of Vatican 2 and the question of the vernacular, the Irish language masses composed by people like Seán Ó Riada or Tomás Ó Canainn, and the recent projects which offer a version of the gospels in Ulster Scots.

This course will examine the tradition of the long poem in Irish literature, both in the Irish and English languages. It will examine poems such as the epic, An Táin and “Cúirt an Mheánoíche” (The Midnight Court) in a variety of translations, or the poem the “Great Hunger” by Patrick Kavanagh. It will investigate the intersection between the epic and the long poem, and discuss the poetic sequence. It will also examine more contemporary long poems such as those by Martina Evans and Thomas McCarthy, alongside hyper-contemporary work by Dawn Watson.

In Western cultures, no single volume has inspired as much creative work - and as wide a range of creative responses - as the Bible. The study of the Bible in turn deeply influenced the discipline of literary studies, as ways of reading and interpreting the Bible gave rise to practices of literary interpretation. In this course, you'll have the opportunity to participate in centuries-old traditions of discussing, interpreting, and responding creatively to biblical texts. We will read key narratives from the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament alongside literary adaptations and interpretations by authors including William Shakespeare, Robert Southwell, Mary Sidney, George Herbert, John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Martin Luther King, George Oppen, Marilynne Robinson, Dawn Karima Pettigrew, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Written assessments will include responses to our readings and analytical essays. There will also be a creative option for the course's final written project.

In a new book about her work as longtime obituary writer for the Economist, Ann Wroe dubs the task "catching lives": i.e., capturing and conveying the crucial elements that illuminate a subject's personality, behavior, motivation, and even their soul. We will explore journalistic techniques, along with ethical and even moral considerations, in the writing of lives, both the living and the dead, in formal biographies, in informal profiles, in obituaries, and in appreciations. From current books such as His Name Is George Floyd and Elon Musk and Going Infinite, to the pithy profiles of contemporary figures written on deadline in the wake of news events, how do life-writers — who must be part detective, part psychoanalyst, part historian, and part gossip-trawler, but always fair and thorough — go about their work?

In this course, we will challenge the single story/ies U.S. schools and curricula have told about books, characters, and cultural groups by focusing on literature by and about people from various populations that have been traditionally underrepresented in the United States. We will discuss young adult literature from parallel cultures (including possible works by and about African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/as, Native Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, and other ethnic groups), as well as literature by and about populations traditionally defined by class, religion, ability, gender and sexuality. Course participants will investigate theoretical perspectives, issues, controversies, and educational implications for these texts, including race and racism, whiteness and privilege (in society and in the educational system), and critical literacy. As an extension of the course, we will also examine the young adult literature market and how contemporary media may reinforce or resist the stereotypes, labels, and single stories associated with these cultures. Possible texts include All American Boys, American Born Chinese (graphic novel), a Jacqueline Woodson novel, Openly Straight, a canonical text like To Kill a Mockingbird, Every Day, and several choice options, including a Classic/Newberry text, one text representing a non-abled bodied protagonist, and one contemporary text.

This course is designed to provide students with a specific and global view of the diversity of literatures that arose in and after the late 18th century to address the questions of human happiness and human freedom in a world that was being transformed by the imperial encounter, vastly expanding markets, and revolutions both conceptual and actual. We will primarily concern ourselves with novels written or circulated in English beyond metropolitan English-speaking countries for the consumption of a worldwide English-speaking audience, with an emphasis on the history of empire and its aftermath as it manifests at the domestic, political, and transnational scales. We will consider such writers as E.M Forster, Muriel Spark, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Anton Shammas, Devika Rege, and Isabella Hammad.

This course will examine Irish poetry, written both in Irish and English, through the prism of protest. It will explore the public role occupied by the poet in Ireland and the concurrent anxieties and responsibilities felt by the poets who have occupied that role. The course will examine the formal prosodic dimensions of the poems and students will also learn about the historical circumstances in which the poems were produced. The course will include the work of WB Yeats, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Seamus Heaney, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Paula Meehan, Liam Ó Muirthile, Michael O’Loughlin, Aifric MacAodha and Thomas McCarthy.

Public Speaking and Debate is a skills-based course designed to prepare students for the real world necessity of public speaking, while also cultivating the skills necessary to be competitive on the college speech and debate circuit if they so desire. Students will have the opportunity to join our Speech and Debate Travel Team and compete across the country in various events if they wish. The events range from 2 person team debate to individual persuasive speeches, to mock congresses, and even dramatic monologues! Team members are also eligible for scholarships for their participation. Day one of the course will be lectures and activities to allow students to become familiar with all competitive events as well as traditional public speaking for those students who do not wish to compete. We will dedicate day two to practicing the skills we learned the day before! Students will leave the course with an increased comfort with public speaking, extensive knowledge of persuasive speech, expanded analytical and critical thinking skills, and familiarity with the art of argumentation.

When war comes, many might imagine that theatre and other forms of performance stop. But, among the many forms of resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a vast increase in the number of new plays representing the suffering and the resilience of the Ukrainian people, many of which have already been translated into English. There has, in contrast, been less attention paid to other forms of performance writing: for example, poetry being created for, or disseminated through, digital media, reaching audiences instantly with all the urgency of the moment. This course has as its central aim the exploration of these materials, both ones already in English translation and ones that might become available. It seeks to understand what has been created and how it is disseminated as cultural practice during the Russian invasion. It will run as a classroom on the Notre Dame campus, meeting simultaneously with one taught in English at the Ukrainian Catholic University, enabling collaboration and shared learning between ND and UCU students. Thisthe course is equivalent to other English electives in content and the types of assignments, and no prior knowledge or course is expected (except for the English gateway of ENGL 30101, which is a co-req. for all English major electives)

This is a course for students who are ready to immerse themselves in the strange contagious waters of poetry. We'll read across regions, languages, communities and time periods to connect to poetry's aesthetic, formal, and political urgencies and possibilities, and we'll write an array of poems of our own. Expect to write individual lyrics as well as prose poems, letters, verse plays, sound poems, collages, remixes, performance pieces, and verse plays, and to poke around in the traditional and digital media by which poems have been shared. I'll expect you to write in- and out- of class poems, work collaboratively on group projects and translations, present, perform, participate, offer kind supportive feedback on peer work., and propose and execute a final project of your own devising.

This writing seminar examines how historical, political and cultural violence shape language, narrative, and collective and individual identities, and considers art as a form of transformational testimony. The very act of documenting the nuanced affective, symbolic, and structural after-effects of systemic violence can be consciousness shifting for artists and viewers, writers and readers, and thus make available to us new modes of knowledge transmission and resilience, and heighten our individual and collective imaginative capacities. In this class, we will ask: How do writers and artists translate the pain of war, forced migration, and state sanctioned violence into language? What narrative strategies do literatures of exile and resistance engage? How are memory, temporality, and spatiality reimagined in narratives of resistance and testimony? Is literature a form of “archive,” and if so, what is the archival work of the writer in the context of violence and annihilation? How have writers, artists, and filmmakers productively challenged grammars of denial and the politics of erasure? We will study literature, visual art, films and performance pieces that engage with and respond to state-sanctioned violence, document the psychic, spiritual and material consequences of displacement, and generate new visions of identity, community and nationhood in an increasingly global world. Students will generate creative work in response to the assigned readings

How do you build a compelling world that's not just a backdrop, but part of the story? "Fantastic Worlds" is a reading-intensive fiction workshop and an exploration of "the Fantastic." The Fantastic is a term that encompasses a wide range of genres (Sci-Fi, Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Speculative, and Surrealism) and specific effects (the marvelous, uncanny, surreal, weird, strange, unreal, dreamlike, and nightmarish). Through the lens of the Fantastic, we will explore a wide range of conventions and techniques related to narrative, syntax, and figurative language. We will also consider the position of the Fantastic in times of ecological crisis, war, and political turmoil. Readings will include work from William Blake, John Milton, Octavia E. Butler, J. R. R. Tolkien, Aase Berg, Jeff VanderMeer, James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, Hiromi Itō, William Gibson, Frank Herbert, and others.

In this course, we'll investigate the piercing and propulsive properties of short texts. While many of the texts we'll read are by poets, we'll encounter a range of genres including essays, short stories, captions, letters, annotations, fragments, and epigrams. In addition to trying out hands at a variety of short forms, we'll also examine how writers assemble short texts into sequences and longer works, ultimately using these methods to conceive of and configure final projects of our own. Coursework will include in- and out-of-class writing, collaborations, workshops, presentations, and a final project.

In her book, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Edwidge Danticat states that "we are all living dyingly." The concept of death and/or dying is part of our collective and shared experience. It presents us with the larger possibilities on how to live, how to experience, how to persevere, and how to change. In this course we will examine the politics of trauma, disaster, and memory. We will read across genres in fiction, essays, and poetry in order to write work that contemplates memory as a locus for resilience. We will look at how writers are grappling with some of the more pressing issues of our time i.e., climate change, natural disaster, femicide, colonialism, war, among others. Students will write prose that looks to redress what it means to "live dyingly."

A three-credit course in writing pedagogy for students working as tutors in the University Writing Center.

The novella is more popular than ever. You might find a table of short reads in an urban bookstore, notice a short novel on the year’s literary prize list, or see a slim volume tucked neatly in a bag or back pocket. But what is the appeal of the short novel today, and how does that depend on the form’s history? In this course we will read a range of contemporary novellas as well as key older texts alongside essays about reading and attention in the twenty-first century. In the process, we will ask what pleasures short novels provide, and how they compare to what we are able to think with longer fictions. This course will include creative and critical assignments.

Scholars create new editions of older texts for numerous reasons, building on a tradition that dates back centuries. Modern computing enables scholars to pursue the same rigor in creating editions while making their work more accessible to broader audiences and more open to reuse and further interpretation. Students in this course will learn how to create scholarly editions in a digital format using the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI), a durable standard built on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for documenting distinctive features of documents. They will learn core concepts of digital text markup alongside key conventions of textual scholarship, and will explore the implications of representing document features at various levels of specificity, experiencing editorial work as a close reading practice and an interpretive practice. Literary/historical texts, medieval and modern, will be used to test out concepts, and students will complete a final project from either a pre-selected text or a text of their own choosing. While the course is computer heavy, no prior programming experience is required.

Asian theatre- and film-makers have produced some of the most innovative and exciting versions of Shakespeare's work. His strong presence in Asia also speaks to the histories and legacies of colonization and cultural imperialism. This course explores several well-known Shakespearean plays through the lens of Asian adaptation, rooted in both close reading of the plays themselves and the historical-cultural contexts of their adaptations. How, when, and why have specific Shakespearean plays captured the imaginations of Asian theatre artists and filmmakers? How have they transformed Shakepearean texts through translation, the use of local performance forms, new geographic and historical settings, and other techniques? How do these reimaginings rethink what "Shakespeare" might mean? By exploring such questions, students will gain a deeper understanding of Shakespeare, Asian theatre, and the complexities of their conjoining.

How do you tell a story that is supposed to be unspeakable? In this course, we will investigate the ways in which LGBTQ writers have transformed narrative conventions as they explore their experiences and their identities through fiction. Beginning with Oscar Wilde's 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray and continuing through the modern and postwar eras into the twenty-first century, we will look at LGBTQ British and American writers whose work engaged with or dramatically departed from the dominant conventions that typically shaped fictions of identity formation, of love and marriage, of sexual experience, of political protest, and of death and loss. We will also investigate important moments in queer history, and the changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, and identity that have shaped both the realities and the fictions of LGBTQ writers over the past hundred and thirty years.

Ancient Greek and Latin literature - history, epic, tragedy, novels, oratory - has a second life in English literature as it is reproduced, echoed, or recalled. Pairing important works in Greek and Roman literature (in translation) with works of English literature, this course will look at some of the ways that writers in English have used the traditions of western antiquity. Shakespeare uses Julius Caesar and Ovid, Milton reanimates Hesiod and Vergil, Alexander Pope and James Joyce share a Homeric inspiration but little else, and Victorian novelists plunder their classical educations to raise up and to tear down the social pretentions of their time. Students will study the ancient texts in their own right and will develop skills in interpreting the remarkable range of uses to which they are put by their modern translations, borrowings, and adaptations.

This class will introduce students to theories that enhance our understanding of literature as well as theories that arise out of literary criticism that help us understand the world in ways that nothing else can. That is: theory for literature and literature interpretation as theory. We will begin by asking what "theory" is, and the value of abstract thought in general. Then we will survey literary theory from Aristotle to the present day, including both liberal and conservative schools of thought. Students can expect to have a good introduction to theories of form, mimesis, and mediation, bodies of work that emerged from both Kantian and Hegelian philosophy including cultural studies and the Frankfurt school, as well as new criticism, performance/gender theory, literary sociology, ecocriticism, and world/transnational approaches to literary history. Readings will be a mix of selected excerpts and primary texts. Coursework will involve three short essays and one long essay in which students either apply several theories to a piece of literary or discuss several theories in relation to one another.

This course will examine the four tragedies upon which Shakespeare's reputation most securely rests: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Our objectives will be to acquire an in-depth knowledge of Shakespeare's four major tragedies; to become familiar with early modern English and develop an appreciation of the importance of linguistic history; to examine tragedy as a dramatic genre, as an experience, and as a cultural preoccupation; and to learn about Shakespeare's age and his cultural legacy. Along with our modern editions of Shakespeare, we will read Christopher Haigh's Elizabeth I and a number of recent scholarly essays. Work will include several short written assignments, a midterm, a final, and a paper of 7-10 pages.

How has literature participated in people’s efforts to develop, understand, inhabit, and critique a range of ideas and practices concerning gender, sexuality—in tandem with other axes along which human identity, affiliation, and difference have historically been organized? Conversely, how have these topics, and ideas about them, affected the creation and reception of literary texts? Literature, literary thinking, and the forms of reading and critique both endemic and errant to literary study have all been foundational to the formation of those sets of ideas commonly known as feminist theory and queer theory. And these discussions—along with often overlapping areas of inquiry having to do with race and ethnicity, religion, kinship, and intimate relations—constitute key elements of literary and cultural studies today. In this upper-level seminar, we will read and discuss a range of literature, criticism, and theory, drawn mostly from the 20th century in the US, as we work together to generate accounts of what literary texts and literary-critical methods can contribute to our ideas about gender, sexuality, and other forms of social alliance and difference, and how these intellectual currents can shed new light on US literature. These discussions will help us develop fuller understandings of the roles narrative, language, and representation may play in processes of social formation and transformation more broadly. The readings in this primarily discussion-based class will consist of literary, critical, and theoretical texts. Assignments will include frequent reading responses, in-class writing prompts, research-based term papers, in-class presentations, and a contribution to a class anthology.

Critical pedagogy, or education intended to inspire radical self love, social consciousness and action for change, has the potential to become one of the most relevant and powerful tools in urban education today. This course will consider the potential of conceptual and empirical work in critical pedagogy and cultural studies to inform, confront and transform many of the persistent challenges we presently face domestically and internationally in urban classrooms, schools, and school systems. The course begins with an examination of the historical antecedents of critical pedagogy, both from the Western philosophical tradition and ?Othered? Post-colonial traditions from East and South Asia, Africa, the African-Diaspora, and Latin America. The course will then examine the theory and research of critical pedagogists such as Paulo Freire, Sonia Nieto, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, Antonia Darder, and bell hooks. The second half of the course will focus on cultural studies and, in particular, critical pedagogies of popular culture in urban education. Lectures and student activities will focus on hip-hop and spoken word poetry, film, television, mass media consumption and production and their implications for transformative pedagogical engagements with young people in major cities across the globe.

This introductory course surveys the core texts, doctrines, ideas, and cultural controversies related to First Amendment protections for free expression. We will be especially interested in some large questions: what is expression? How have our ideas of freedom of expression evolved as we enter the digital age? What kind of expression should be permissible? What happens when the public forum is fully online? What is the relationship between free expression and democratic-self government? Is there a difference between individual, group, and government speech? How do we navigate alternative ways of thinking about free expression in a global media ecosystem? We will consider a selection of exemplary cases, controversies, and literary texts: among our topics will include the following: the transformation of speech in the age of digital media; libel, satire and parody; piracy, intellectual property and copyright; privacy and surveillance; hate speech and incitement; obscenity and pornography. We will investigate the topic by studying relevant case law, literary texts (including fiction, film and new media), political philosophy, and information policy? Disclaimer: you will encounter speech that is potentially offensive and discomforting in this course. Note: this course is delivered fully online. The course design combines required live weekly meetings online with self-scheduled lectures, problems, assignments, and interactive learning materials. To participate, students will need to have a computer with webcam, reliable internet connection, and a quiet place to participate in live sessions.

Fantasy. Wit. Ribaldry. The Macabre. The Grotesque. Word play. Satire. Parody. This course will read diverse examples of the long and fertile comic tradition in Irish literature (in Irish and in English), from medieval to modern, in order to think about the politics of humor, get an alternative take on the Irish literary tradition, and enjoy a good laugh. Authors will include unknown acerbic medieval scribes, satiric bardic poets, Swift, Merriman, Sheridan, Wilde, Flann O'Brien, and emergent writers. No knowledge of Irish Gaelic is assumed or necessary.

In this course, we will be reading Dante's Commedia as well as works by Aristotle and various ancient and medieval philosophers. Our aim will be to understand the way an Aristotelian worldview informs the Commedia. We will look at the cosmology of the work and how it responds to ancient and medieval theories of the cosmos. We will also investigate the ethics of Dante's famous journey to hell, purgatory, and heaven with a view to identifying its Aristotelian elements. For instance, what is the role of pleasure in the ethical life? What is the highest good of the human being? How should human beings live in such a way as to achieve their highest end? All readings will be in translation.

This course focuses on how we can bring critical theoretical approaches to thinking about new media technologies, not just within the context of studying inscriptions and culture, but also through other disciplinary and hands-on approaches. The readings shall be a mix of fiction (mostly science fiction), electronic literature, some theory, and possibly a few media archaeological how-tos.

The field of literary studies has recently seen a return of interest in the aesthetic, traditionally defined as the realm of beauty detached from the concerns of everyday life, but now coming into focus as a mode of experience that develops individual and collective capacities, including for social and political critique. Representative titles include Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), Derek Attridge's The Work of Literature (2015), Caroline Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), and Deepika Bahri's Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (2003). This seminar examines such returns to the aesthetic in theory and criticism while also addressing the returns (or gains) of the aesthetic for literary study today. Readings and discussion will be divided into four main units: a first on foundational treatments of aesthetics in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary theory and philosophy; a second on the adaptation of such theories in the early twentieth century, notably as part of the methodology of close reading that came to define academic literary studies in the United States and Britain; a third on the uptake and critique of aesthetically oriented methodologies in the mid- to late twentieth century; and a fourth on the past several decades' attempts to revive and redefine aesthetic concerns and criticism. Students will be invited to engage critically with the seminar material while reflecting on its returns for their own work.

This is a course for anyone who has ever kept a diary, or a blog, or tried to write in essays or letters how they feel about their life. What is an examined life? And how might this change with the old and new media we have at our disposal? We'll begin early and end late, with a range of reading from correspondences, diaries and essays. Early authors will include Montaigne, James Boswell, and Dorothy Wordsworth; later ones will include David Foster Wallace, Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti, author of our titular text, How Should a Person Be? The reading for this course will be expansive but pleasurable. However, participation in the course will be partly by way of writing. All students will build a portfolio of life writing (this will include keeping up a journal, blog, vlog, writing letters to a real or imagined friend, or working on a personal essay), as well as writing a conventional essay about one or two of the texts we read. The grade for the course will not depend on the quality of your creative portfolio but on your willingness to think about a life as something that can be grasped and shaped in different ways by representation.

This course offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the vast variety of theoretical approaches used to understand media and technologies. From film, TV, and videogames to computers, internet, and social media, we will study different methods and concepts that help us understand our mediated condition(s) better. Moving historically and geographically, we will also encounter the many ways in which the term 'media' itself gets deployed and critiqued in scholarship across humanistic and social scientific disciplines. We will plug some of these (critical) theoretical understandings of media and culture into the longer histories of politics, philosophy, language, and literature, considering, for example, books as media technologies. And finally, we will ask what studies of media and mediation can do for our comprehension of the politico-economic, sociocultural, racial, and environmental crises surrounding us today.

In this course we will read novels and books of poetry published within the last two years. We'll engage with historical, contemporary, and speculative definitions of latinidad, taking up the ideas and provocations offered by the texts we'll read over the semester. In particular, we will focus on how latinidad works as both a conceptual category as well as an on-the-ground practice of living in community, an identity marker as well as a way of imagining the world. We will also think about how latinidad is inclusive as well as exclusive. We'll use the texts we read together to consider how race, ethnicity, migration, gender, sexuality, politics, and religion inform historical, present, and future meanings of latinidad. This semester, we'll read texts by Martín Espada, Jaime Cortez, Aracelis Girmay, Urayoán Noel, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Xavier Aquino Navarro, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Yesenia Montilla, Xochitl González, and Ada Limón.

This course will be devoted to the history, culture and literature of Scandinavia during the age of the Vikings. Our concerns will be both with the social and political events of the period and with the ways in which medieval Scandinavians used fiction, history, and mythology in order to present and interpret the world in which they lived. The issues we will consider include Viking religion and mythology; the unification of the individual Scandinavian kingdoms; the Christianization of a heroic warrior culture; the Vikings' own concerns with history and self-representation; the raids and colonizing missions that they effected in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic; and the reception of the Vikings in the post-medieval era. Readings will include selections from Norse sagas and poetry (all in translation) as well as secondary works on history and art.

Why did the Middle Ages produce so many legends, so many stories about gods, heroes, and fantastic events? What do the origins of these stories tell us about medieval European culture and the way it used both writing and the fantastic? What do the differences between different versions of the same story reveal about the stories' audience and composition? Why do some of these stories still resonate powerfully today? These are the kinds of questions we will ask as we survey a range of medieval works representing a variety of literary traditions, including Anglo-Saxon (Beowulf), Norse (the Poetic Edda and Hrolf Kraki's Saga), French (the Song of Roland), Italian (the Inferno), Welsh (the Mabinogion), and Finnish (Kalevala).

"A person should be wise enough - but never too wise; life is most pleasant for those who know just enough". Old Norse proverb, from Hávamál. In this course, students will come to grips with Old Norse - a term that encompasses the medieval vernacular languages of Scandinavia and the vernacular literatures that flourished in Norway and Iceland between the Viking Age and the Reformation. The Old Norse literary corpus is remarkable for its breadth and variety, its literary quality and its cultural value: Norse manuscripts preserve our fullest record of pre-Christian mythology from northern Europe; traditional Germanic narrative and poetic traditions are uniquely well-represented in Old Norse versions, some of which date back to well before the Conversion; in the Icelandic sagas, one of Europe's most distinctive medieval genres, we see an unprecedented forerunner of "realistic" prose fiction. Knowledge of Old Norse also gives access to many primary sources relating to the perennially controversial and fascinating Vikings, who took their language as far afield as Russia, Rome, Reykjavik and Rouen. (And Old Norse was probably the first European language spoken in North America.) Over the course of a semester, we will learn the fundamentals of Old Norse grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Although it has some quirks, Old Norse is not a particularly difficult language to pick up, and students will soon be able to read a saga in the original. We will introduce students to the history and literature of medieval Scandinavia, using translations at first but gradually bringing in original language material as our mastery of Old Norse increases. This course will be assessed by means of regular grammar quizzes and translation exercises, and a final exam.

Dostoevsky’s fascination with Shakespeare and his inquiry into the “accursed questions” began when only a teenager. Both authors are interested in the visibility of action as a manifestation of subterranean issues, what seems and what appears, and the psychic drama reflective of political and cultural problems that their characters internalize. In this course, we will explore the complex layering that allows the two authors to explore and comment on the dialectical relationship between human beings, the self’s interaction with the self, and the role of art for the audience. Can the two authors’ works be considered life manuals where they lay out the poetics of existence? We will be looking at some of their works, including Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), Hamlet (Shakespeare), and others, as processes where the first step is to identify societal issues as riddles, followed by the acknowledgment that a certain riddle is a worthy pursuit.

This course explores the phenomenon of Shakespeare in the cinema/movie theatre, examining ‘Shakespeare and film' by concentrating on the meanings provoked by the "and" that joins the terms. We shall be looking at examples of films of Shakespeare plays both early and recent, both in English and in other languages, and both ones that stick close to conventional concepts of how to film Shakespeare and adaptations at varying degrees of distance from his language, time, plot, reaching a limit in versions that erase Shakespeare from the film. We will also be looking at the recent phenomenon of "Live from" broadcasts of live theatre to movie audiences. The transposition of different forms of Shakespearean texts (printed, theatrical, filmic) and the confrontation with the specificities of film production have produced and continue to produce a phenomenon whose cultural meanings will be the subject of our investigations. There will be screenings of the films to be studied in the Browning Cinema.

Gothic, the subject of this course, might be considered a distant relative of not only English but also modern German, Dutch, and the various Scandinavian languages. It is in fact the oldest recorded Germanic language, and was spoken, in one form or another, by related groups who spread southward, eastward, and westward across Europe from the first to the sixth centuries, remaking much of the political landscape but leaving a very small written record. Gothic survives primarily in a late-fourth-century translation of the New Testament, prepared by Ulfila, an Arian bishop of the Goths. This is primarily a language course, in which we will learn the grammar of Gothic and translate passages from the New Testament and the Skeireins (a fragmentary commentary on the Gospel of John). We will also ponder the peculiar purple manuscript with silver script in which Ulfila's translation survives (the Codex argenteus), speculate on the character of the Crimean Gothic recorded over a millennium after Ulfila's death, explore the structural relations among Gothic and the other Germanic languages, and discuss the conceptual roles the Goths have been made to play in the formation of European states, Germanic ethnicity, nationalism, horror fiction, and modern racial separatist movements. No prior knowledge of an older language is required, although, since this is a language course, curiosity and an agile mind are.

This course will introduce you to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, the deservedly famous author from medieval England who had an exceptionally good sense of humor. We will spend the majority of the class on Chaucer's magnum opus, the Canterbury Tales, an ambitious collection of tales drawn from different countries and genres. We will also read works by other medieval authors to provide context. Throughout the course, you will hone your Middle English comprehension skills as you confront challenging, diverse, and sophisticated pieces of literature. Students will write two papers as well as several targeted analysis exercises. No prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval literature is expected.

This course examines the history and diversity of the English language. After an introduction to the methods of historical and comparative linguistics, the development of English will be chronologically surveyed. Much of the course will concentrate on specific historical topics, such as the introduction of writing, the influence of writing and printing on the standardization of English, the spread of English outside England itself, the diversity of English, contact between English and other languages, and the status of English as a world language today. Throughout the semester we will work with both empirical data and also the discovery of competing narratives for writing linguistic history.

In November 1882, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his friend and fellow-poet Robert Bridges: "I am learning Anglo-Saxon and it is a vastly superior thing to what we have now." Auden was similarly moved by his first encounter with Old English: "I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish . . . I learned enough to read it, and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences." ENGL 40212 is an introduction to the language and literature that so captivated Hopkins and Auden, that later inspired Tolkien and Lewis, and that remains the historical and linguistic foundation of English literary studies. Our focus for about half the term will be the grammar of Old English, but from the very beginning we will read from a variety of texts in verse and prose (including riddles, a monastic sign-language manual, and King Alfred's prefatory letter to the Old English translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care), and the course will culminate in a focused study of The Wanderer and The Dream of the Rood. This course may be especially useful for students interested in historical linguistics and the history of the English language, in the Anglo-Saxon foundations of British literature, and in medieval literature in general. Requirements include two exams, a series of grammar quizzes, and a translation project. The final exam will involve a short oral recitation. Graduate students will meet for two extra class periods and will be assigned some additional reading.

This class introduces John Milton's poetry in the context of his life and times and with attention to current critical issues. Much of the course will be focused on Milton's major poems: his early masque, Comus, his grand epic, Paradise Lost, his brief epic, Paradise Regained, and his late tragedy, Samson Agonistes. We will also explore Milton's influence on the Romantics and beyond, looking at William Blake's water-color illustrations of Milton's poetry, at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and at the Miltonic influence in classic Frankenstein films and in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

This course explores the various literatures (especially poetry) that emerge at a time of dramatic change in early modern (16-17th-century) Ireland, including works originally written in Irish and English ranging from courtly poetry of praise and love for noble patrons to rather less savory verse justifications of colonial violence. In tandem with our reading of primary materials (read in English translation), we will examine the historiography of the period to grasp key debates and shifts in scholarly understanding; in so doing, we will take up long standing areas of debate regarding the characteristics of this colonial encounter, the degree to which comparisons are useful or apt, the nature of Irish literary culture, the characteristics of the age, and, if we're feeling cocky, the modern. While you need not know any Irish (Gaelic) to take this course, you should be prepared to conjoin history and theory, poetry and politics, through historicized close reading while working across genres to produce original criticism in the form of several papers whose topics you will develop yourself (with a creative option or two). In fact, that's the whole point: finding your own passion and doing work that only you can do! The course will count toward the IRLL major and minor, the IRST minor, the European Studies minor.

The Pastoral has been one of the longest-lasting and frequently most prestigious genres (or modes) of poetry in English-language traditions. This course explores how and why poetry that extols the virtues of rural life became so pervasive; how it adapted in the face of changing social, economic, and environmental contexts over more than a thousand years; what problems Pastoral poetry addresses and what problems it causes; how modern and postmodern poets have responded to the Pastoral tradition in a decidedly post-pastoral age; last but not least, what work Pastoral poetry can still do for readers today, and where this genre (or mode) can still do important cultural work. In the first half of the course, we will read broadly across the long history of Pastoral poetry, with texts from the classical period, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period. The second half of the semester will be spent interrogating the changes that have occurred in the Pastoral genre (or mode) since the Industrial Revolution. An important part of the course will be looking at recent and contemporary engagements with the genre (or mode) in which poets critique or react against its conventions in the pursuit of newer and truer forms of ecopoetry. The critical framework for the course will be provided by ecocriticism--the relatively new critical approach that believes it is possible and useful to read literary texts from an environmental perspective.

Jokes. Word play. Ribaldry. The Macabre. The Grotesque. Wit. Satire. Comic Verse. Parody. This course will read diverse examples of the long and fertile comic tradition in Irish literature (in Irish and in English), from medieval to modern, in order to enjoy a good laugh, get an alternative take on the Irish literary tradition, think about the politics of (Irish) humor, and get smarter. Authors will include unknown acerbic medieval scribes, satiric bardic poets, Swift, Merriman, Sheridan, Wilde, and Flann O'Brien. No knowledge of Irish is assumed or necessary. Coursework will include plentiful reading, several papers (including a creative option), and a final presentation. The course satisfies the literature requirement and counts toward the IRLL major and minor, and the IRST minor.

In the medieval play The Castle of Perseverance, a stage direction indicates that the Devil should go to battle against Mankind with gunpowder burning out of his hands, ears, and arse. The spectacle must have been at once terrifying and hilarious. But how on earth was it staged? This course will consider early English dramatic representations of the Father of Lies, pondering whether audiences were meant to laugh at the Devil or with him. In the first half of the semester, we will study demons and the characters who invoke them in traditional sacred drama, from the earliest surviving play written in England through the three major genres of medieval English theater: the cycle play, the saint’s play, and the morality play. We will see the Devil prosecute Adam, Satan tempt Jesus, King Herod slaughter the Innocents, and the Vices lure Mankind to damnation. Combining demonic dissimulation with cunning craft, they make sin appear glamorous, not only to other characters in the play but also, perhaps, to the audience. In the latter half of the course, we will turn to the crafty villains of early modern commercial theater and closet drama. The new genres of history and tragedy confront the audience with diabolical characters that nevertheless seem charismatic or sympathetic. Spanning nearly 300 years of dramatic performance, our readings will push us to consider how medieval and early modern playwrights represent the nature of evil and the bounds of human freedom. Course Readings: Le Jeu d’Adam; The York Corpus Christi Plays; The Digby Mary Magdalene Play; The Castle of Perseverance; Mankind; Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; William Shakespeare, King Richard III, King Henry IV Part I, Othello; Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Miriam; Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass; John Milton, Comus.

One of the most prolific authors in the modern period - the author of the twentieth century, according to one admirer - Tolkien is also one of the most influential, controversial, and challenging. He inspired a craze for fantasy literature that persists today and that itself has influenced the movies, games, and images of pop culture. As often as readers praise his novels, however, critics (particularly scholars) vilify them for their plots, style, and characters. Further complicating this reception is the fact that as a writer Tolkien, who by trade was a medievalist and philologist at the University of Oxford, produced far more than his well-known books on Middle Earth. In an effort to get a broad understanding of Tolkien as a writer and of the continuities that run through everything he wrote, we'll read these blockbusters, but also some of his original poetry, several of his academic articles, and his translations of medieval poems. We'll consider what it meant to be a writer when Tolkien was, including the way he balanced teaching and writing, the importance of his writers' group (the Inklings), and the process by which his sometimes illegible handwritten drafts found their way (changing in the process) to the finished products that shook the literary world.

This course will introduce you to medieval romance, one of the most popular genres of medieval literature and one that gives us some of the best-loved literary characters of all time, including Lancelot and Guinevere. We will study the genre of romance, including Arthurian romance and other varieties, from the genre's inception. We will pay particular attention to the form of story-telling that it popularizes, the concept of love that it systematizes, and the notion of heroism on which it depends. We will read many texts in their original Middle English, but no prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval literature is expected.

Beowulf is often called the first great poem in English. But why? In this course, we will explore the nature of Beowulf: is it really English? Is it really a masterpiece? Is it really a poem? (The answers to these questions are by no means simple.) We will read all 3182 lines of Beowulf over the course of the semester--mostly through the interpretations of modern translators, but with an eye on the original text as well. Our main goal in our discussions and writing will be to work out where Beowulf's aesthetic and emotional force comes from, and how it persists: why does this work continue to move and inspire us more than a thousand years after it was written down? As well as the poem itself, this course will look at modern adaptations of the Beowulf story across many media, including movies, music, and comic books. No prior knowledge of the Old English language is necessary: Students will pick up the basics as they go along, but there will be no assessed language work in the course.

In the wake of the Reformation-era's massive upheavals came the greatest flowering of devotional poetry in the English language. This body of literature offers its readers the opportunity to explore questions pertaining broadly to the study of lyric and to the study of the relationships between religion and literature. Early modern devotional poetry oscillates between eros and agape, private and communal modes of expression, shame and pride, doubt and faith, evanescence and transcendence, mutability and permanence, success and failure, and agency and helpless passivity. It experiments with gender, language, form, meter, voice, song, and address. We'll follow devotional poets through their many oscillations and turns by combining careful close reading of the poetry with the study of relevant historical, aesthetic, and theological contexts. You'll learn to read lyric poetry skillfully and sensitively, to think carefully about relationships between lyric and religion, and to write incisively and persuasively about lyric. Authors we'll read may include Thomas Brampton, Richard Maidstone, Francesco Petrarca (in translation), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, Mary Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Henry Constable, Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and the great hymn writer Isaac Watts.

The Icelandic sagas represent an unparalleled flowering of imaginative prose literature in medieval Europe. They have been called the first modern novels, but their utterly distinctive voice arises from their position on the periphery of the known world at a time when story-telling was in a state of flux: oral traditions were blending into literate compositions; pagan mythology was being supplanted (though never effaced) by Christian doctrines. Icelanders were in the process of creating an entirely new nation in an entirely new environment, and the sagas record their successes, failures, fears and aspirations with great drama, humor, and insight. In this course, students will read extensively in the corpus of Icelandic sagas. We will gain an understanding of the various genres of sagas in existence and how they relate to one another and to other contemporary forms of literature. We will study the history of medieval Iceland and relate changing political situations to the development of new literary modes over time. While most of the texts will be approached through translations, we will also study one saga in detail in its original language. Students who have not completed ENGL 40203 Introduction to Old Norse must contact the instructor before registering for this course. Assessment will include two papers and a translation exercise.

Medieval literature abounds with tales of travel. Celtic, Norse, and British authors created an exciting array of narratives about journeys through far-flung, fantastical, and holy places, and transformative encounters with new people, landscapes, and ideas. While these stories often depict the distant and unfamiliar, they also reveal that which is "close to home," shedding new light on the identities and beliefs of travelers and audience members alike. In this course we will explore the genre of travel literature through a variety of texts, both sacred and secular (adventure and voyage tales, pilgrimage accounts, sagas, hagiographies, etc.). In our conversations, papers, and, if students choose, creative work, we will analyze the ideas, motifs, and compositional goals that animate these works and examine the implications that they hold, with respect to both the cultures from which they originate, and ourselves as contemporary readers (or vicarious journeyers). We will read both a range of primary literary texts and recent critical essays. Primary texts include the Voyage of St. Brendan, the Welsh Mabinogi, the Vinland Sagas, the Book of Margery Kempe, and the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (all available in modern English, some excerpted). Students will be asked to write two papers (or one paper and one creative project with analytical reflection), take a written exam, and give a presentation, as well as to participate regularly in class discussions.

This course introduces students to a wide variety of themes in Shakespeare's plays as well as to the plays' context and conventions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the plays' nature as scripts for the stage and, more recently, film. However the course will primarily focus on the difficulties of social interaction and self knowledge as seen in Shakespeare's use of plays-within-plays and of theatrical themes and language.

This course focuses intensely on William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, two of the Renaissance period's most influential writers. Both writers reflect on the work that fiction can do in addressing our deepest desires and fears; both theorize the imagination's powers as well as its distortions and limitations. Both writers are also deeply concerned with the processes of interpretation that are at the heart of the English major; good readers of Spenser and Shakespeare promise to be good readers of much else. Probable texts: Shakespeare, Hamlet, As You Like It, Henry V, and The Tempest; Spenser, The Faerie Queene and selections from the Amoretti

In this class we will read and analyze a range of legends, myths, stories and more recent YA/ fantasy literature about the gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines of early Ireland and Wales. The original accounts, written in the Middle Ages (and read in English translation - no linguistic experience necessary!), provide insights into the medieval cultural contexts and goals behind these stories. However, we will also consider contemporary transformations of Celtic myth and legend in contemporary fiction and pop culture and ask how our expectations and tastes for the Celtic past speak to our worldview today. Requirements include an exam, multiple writing exercises, oral presentations, and 1-2 longer papers.

This course will cover eight of Shakespeare's plays: All's Well That Ends Well, The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter's Tale. In each case we will focus on the dramatic representation of intractable ethical problems and ask how the play encourages its audience to reflect on moral conflict. In addition to the plays, readings will include material on classical ethical theories as well as modern moral philosophy.

The seventeenth century in Old and New England saw an exciting and unprecedented flourishing of writing by women. This course looks at a rich and diverse range of women's writing, from autobiography, letters, and recipe books, to poetry, fictional and non-fictional prose, and drama. These primary texts will be read and discussed in biographical and historical context, alongside current scholarship. We will begin with Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, before turning to such early modern writers as Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, and Mary Rowlandson. Among the questions to be addressed: How do women fashion themselves in and through their writing? How do gender concerns intersect with class, religion, politics, and race? How do women use and boldly revise different literary forms? Assignments will include oral presentations, two analytical papers, and a midterm and final exam.

This invention of the printing press was, according to Francis Bacon, a technology that changed and altered the whole face and state of things throughout the world. In this course, we will read and examine a selection of books that are considered to have had a major impact on the literary and political culture of the Anglophone world. In each case, we consider the book in question as a material object and as a literary text. Syllabus will include More, Utopia; Bacon, Essays; Shakespeare, Hamlet and The Tempest; Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.

In this course we will read all of Austen's novels, supplemented by helpful contemporary texts, and critical commentary on the works. We will attend to Austen's style (her elegance, her irony, her rudeness); her aesthetic principles; her political and social engagements, (her views on slavery and Empire, the "revolution in female manners" advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft, her critique of masculinity); the function of the marriage plot; and the relationship between the novel and the theatre. Students will gain an appreciation for the complexity of the work of one of the greatest novelists in the English language. They will also consider how these works respond to the historical moment in which they were written, and how and why these works resonate across time.

As a term in European cultural history, decadence most often indicates a late-nineteenth-century movement in which writers and artists provoked the respectable middle class with racy, sordid, overblown and/or absurdist subject matter and methods. This course explores that environment but also takes a broader view, examining alternative visions of decadence over the last two centuries and more, where decadence becomes one way of viewing secular modernity more generally. Our materials include fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy, visual arts, cinema and criticism. Early on, we lay conceptual groundwork with texts by Freud and Nietzsche. Well-known authors (in addition to Freud and Nietzsche) include Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, and Patrick Süskind. We also read several lesser-known authors and study films by Ken Russell, Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter. Please note that our discussion matter is not for the prudish or faint-hearted. Bring a tolerance for the grotesque and a readiness to think carefully about authors who deliberately challenge deeply held Western attitudes concerning morality and values. Assignments include two written exams (one or more in take-home format), an interpretive paper, and bi-weekly reflective writings.

This course examines British literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the context of the period's major social, political, and cultural revolutions. Questions of literature and social justice will be at the forefront of our readings and discussions. We will focus on how writers engaged creatively and rhetorically with topics including the rights of men and women; the legitimacy of revolution; the abolition of slavery; the experiences of poverty and war; the nature of heroism; the powers of the imagination; the potentials of science; and the social role of the writer. We will read selections from a wide range of writers in diverse genres, including Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Olaudah Equiano, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. Instances of contemporary visual art and, where possible, theater and/or film, will help broaden our understanding of this intensely creative and conflictual period in British literary history.

The Victorian era witnessed rapid and drastic changes created by industrialization, capitalism, new technologies, changing gender roles, and an increasing class mobility. Victorian authors responded to these seismic upheavals with novels that imagined society as both undergoing revolution and yet still densely interconnected. The average Victorian novel was three volumes long and contained multiple plots in which characters were intertwined through romance, politics, money, secret identities, blackmail, disease, and sheer accident. In order to become thoroughly acquainted with the Victorian novel's ambition to comprehensively imagine a whole society, this class will focus intently on just four novels - William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, and Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. We will closely study the formal techniques that each writer used to try to reproduce a sense of dense interconnectedness in Victorian society. We will also read excerpts from other Victorians who tried to explain the complexity of society - Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin among them. Students can expect to be graded on class participation, a series of short response papers, two formal paper assignments, and one creative assignment that will ask you to adapt one of our novels for social media.

In 1727, shortly before the publication of the first two volumes of their joint Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, Alexander Pope wrote Jonathan Swift a letter in which he expressed his pleasure at the image of their relationship that the work conveyed. "Methinks we look like friends," he wrote, "side by side, serious and merry by turns, conversing interchangeably, and walking down hand in hand to posterity." Elsewhere, Pope would tell Swift that "yours and my name shall stand linked as friends to posterity, both in verse and prose." This course will provide a conceptual context in which to read, discuss, compare and contrast the works of these two writers. Jonathan Swift (1667-1744) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Pope is remembered to posterity as the most famous poet of his age, whose satires stung a corrupt political regime during England's rise to world power. His long career came in spite of a disabling childhood tuberculosis that left him crippled for life. (In later years, Pope would refer to his "crazy carcass" and "this long disease, my life.") Swift is seen as a masterful political writer in the first age of party, an early, fierce defender of his native Ireland against English colonial policy, and one of the great prose stylists in the language. (His 1726 work, Gulliver's Travels, has never been out of print). If we look close enough, the lifelong friendship and collaboration between the two - an Irish Protestant clergyman and an English Catholic poet - can be viewed as an eighteenth-century rendition of the odd couple. What issues brought them together? Where did they differ on such questions as the role of women, sociability, the nature of the individual in a new consumer society, political economy and the financial revolution, the role of science, global expansion and the ends of empire? These are a few of the questions we will pursue. In addition to the required and collateral readings, each member of the class will be responsible for at least one oral report: by posing a question, by sounding out critical and theoretical response to Swift's and Pope's art, by presenting a thesis on a work at hand, by executing a pantomime, by doing anything short of public scandal to stimulate discussion and to make the class a body unto itself. Each student will also prepare a short, five page paper and a longer critical paper (10-12 pages in length) that demonstrates a capacity for independent thought and research and the ability to argue a thesis in a clear and coherent style.

At the end of the eighteenth century a series of radical shifts in the way culture and society functioned transformed the world. From the American Revolutionary War to the French Revolution and Haitian Independence, fundamental questions were being asked about what constituted the human self, the responsibilities of humans to one another and the mutual obligations between the people and the governments that ruled them. Today, for better and for worse, we are still living with the legacies of these disputes. At the very heart of the debates lay "literature" - a highly contested domain that was often held up as the very essence of liberty. What exactly was this thing called literature and what role did it play in the fights for freedom? In this class we will read contemporary political texts alongside literary works in order to understand the entanglement of literature and revolution, and to consider the role that literature played in shaping the modern world. Texts to be examined will include works by, among others, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Olaudah Equiano, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. The movie version of Linn-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton will frame some of our discussions, raising questions that we can ask of eighteenth-century texts.

This course will explore literatures from a time of dramatic sociopolitical change in early modern (16-17th-century) Ireland, as England was renewing (and energetically justifying) its colonial errand in Ireland, to which Irish people responded in complex ways. We will read a range of texts from royal proclamation to rebel incitements, poetry of love to poetry of the lovelorn, early (anti-Irish, colonialist) ethnography to doggerel travelogue, professional praise poetry to scathing satire, and more. We will look at the intriguing survivals of poetry by women alongside texts that throw Irish manhood into question. In tandem with our reading of primary materials in various languages (read in English translation), we will consider critical debates and shifts in scholarly understanding of the period. Course work will include discussion, reading, short writing assignments and analytical papers, as well as a creative option, as we delve into a fascinating and formative period of Irish history. The course satisfies the literature requirement.

The ballad is, alongside the lyric, one of the major poetic traditions of world literature. Precisely what a ballad is, however, remains a remarkably vexed question. This is in part because ballads fall inconveniently between disciplines - literature, music, book history, folklore, cultural studies - so that the study of ballads requires a broad interdisciplinary approach. For the literary scholar "ballad" is often used to mean a narrative poem, but this definition does not do justice to a vastly more complex history. Often there is no known author; only occasionally do we have any idea when a ballad was written; even when we know the name of the printer, we cannot be sure the print we have is the earliest printing. Moreover, the printed life of ballads—often cheap slip songs known as broadside ballads—only represents only one part of their existence: they need also to be understood as performance texts that straddle the world of orality and print, and which move dynamically through time, evolving as they travel. Rather than seeing these challenges as hurdles to our understanding, this class will explore the possibilities that the ballad opens up for reconsidering our approaches to the study of literature. In this seminar students will learn about the fascinating history of the popular ballad, and how it gave shape to English literature as a discipline; they will engage with Hesburgh Library's Irish Ballad Collection, which provides a fascinating glimpse into popular street song from the nineteenth century in Britain and Ireland. Through these materials students will learn about the history of the ballad, the mentalities of ordinary people in living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the vexed relationship between lyric poetry and popular song, and the economics of poetry production. Students should come prepared to discuss controversial subjects, to have their ideas about what constitutes literature challenged; and, above all, they should be willing to listen, learn, and sing together.

Some of the most enduring stereotypes of British Romanticism involve the cultivation of solitary genius, the return to a pristine Nature, and the celebration of local, rural community. Compelling as these cultural ideals may seem, they have been complicated and enriched by recent scholarship that situates the literary productions of Romanticism within the larger geopoitical frameworks of their historical epoch: such as Britain's colonial enterprise, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, worldwide commercial systems, the transatlantic slave trade, travel and exploration. To become alert to the interaction of these global forces with the period's literary activity is to develop a new,complex appreciations of multiple forms of "Romanticisms" operating and clashing together in relation to rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected world developments. This class will explore the intersection of the local, the national, and the global in well-known canonical writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys as well as woks by such lesser-known figures as Bailie, Smith, Yearsley, Morgan, Cowley, and Starke. Readings and discussion will range generically across fiction, drama, poetry, life writing, abolitionist literature, and political prose.

This double-author course showcases what most readers would see as an "odd couple" among Victorian authors. Charles Dickens (1812-70) was the Shakespeare of his time, a prolific creator of memorable characters and incidents, at once comic and tragic. But post-Victorian critics often see him as a prime exponent of Victorian earnestness, sentimentality and even hypocrisy. And Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was, well, the Wilde of Victorian Britain: he was so dazzling that even those who wished to hate him often had to give up and laugh with him. But his life took a classically tragic form after his public humiliation and imprisonment for homosexual offenses. Our principal texts by Dickens will probably be Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend. Our readings in Wilde will cover the gamut of his efforts but emphasize his society comedies and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Graded coursework includes three papers and a final exam, along with reading quizzes and participation.

"Mad, bad, and dangerous to know" is how the nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron was described by one of his contemporaries, but the phrase could apply just as well to fellow poet Percy Shelley, known in his school days as "Mad Shelley." Originally inspired by the poets' unconventional lifestyles and opinions, the labels serve in this course as points of entry into their remarkable bodies of work. "Mad," for instance, by some estimates denotes Byron's and Shelley's social and political views and activities, but also reflects their interest in representing insane or at least deeply unreasonable characters. "Bad" evokes contemporaneous opinions of their morals—and some readers' assessments of their verse. "Dangerous" captures the sense that each poet posed a threat to established ways of thinking, imagining, writing, and being in the world. Our readings will include short lyrics, long epics and mock epics, and verse dramas, as well as letters, essays, and reviews. The overall objective is to acquaint you with two of the most exceptional and exceptionable poets of the Romantic period, and indeed any period, while giving you experience in reading multiple works by particular writers, comparatively and critically.

Long associated chiefly with the genre of poetry, the Romantic period in Britain (ca. 1790-1830) saw a remarkable surge in the publication and popularity of novels. This course examines the genre's development amid momentous transformations and upheavals, including debates about the rights of men and women, experiences of warfare and domestic conflict, changing regional and national identities, major scientific discoveries and innovations, and transformations in social structures and mores. Focusing mainly on works by Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott, we will consider how the period's changing notions of the self, society, and reading were linked with developments in the form and subject-matter of the novel. We will also consider how the novel's competing impulses toward the fantastical and the factual were expressed in new subgenres, including gothic, political, scientific, and historical fiction. Attention to three major character types-the rebel, the rake, and the reactionary-will provide points of entry into our various topics. A range of critical and theoretical perspectives (and, where possible, contemporary visual art, theater, and/or film) will also help enrich our understanding of British fiction during this formative period.

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” is how one contemporary famously described the nineteenth-century poet Lord Byron, but the phrase also captures the public perception of his friend and fellow poet Percy Shelley: while at school, his nickname was “Mad Shelley.” This course will use the label as a point of entry into the works of these two remarkable writers and their personal and poetic relationship. “Mad” will encapsulate contemporaneous attitudes toward Byron’s and Shelley’s social and political views—including on the topics of revolution, empire, commerce, religion, gender, and sexuality—while also reflecting their shared interest in giving a voice to the seemingly unreasonable or insane. “Bad” will evoke contemporaneous opinions of the poets’ morals—daring, dubious, or depraved, depending on who was judging—as well as some readers’ assessments of their verse. “Dangerous” will capture the sense that each poet posed a threat to established ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. We will gauge the accuracy of these three key terms through the careful reading of various works, including short lyrics, verse dramas, and longer epics or mock epics. Selections from the poets’ essays and letters, contemporaneous reviews, and selected criticism will contextualize and sharpen our understandings of the range, ambition, and enduring relevance of two of the most exceptional (and exceptionable) poets of the era.

This course bridges the theories of the environmental humanities and ecocriticism with the study of Irish literature from 1600 to 1900. We will analyze critical theory of the environment in relation to Irish novels, tales, plays, and poems written during the height of British colonialism in Ireland - by authors like Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, J.M. Synge, Emily Lawless, and W.B. Yeats. Our readings will cover environmental events and colonial systems, such as the deforestation of Ireland, shipwrecks and rebellions, tenant farming, the Irish Famine, and island ecosystems. In class, we will discuss how these environmental contexts impacted the expression of Irish identity and colonial struggle. We will read Irish literature not just for plot, character, and style, but also for the environmental narratives it contains, exploring how each one illuminates the other.

This course investigates the cultural meanings attached to extraordinary bodies and minds. Cultural and literary scholarship has extensively explored issues connected with identities derived from race, gender and sexuality. Only recently have concepts of bodily identity, impairment, stigma, monstrosity, marginalization, deformity, deviance, and difference begun to cohere around disability as a concept. Discussions of these issues are now part of a discipline called Disability Studies. We will cover topics such as communication, inclusion, passing, medical attitudes, social stigma, normalcy, life narratives, bodily representation, mental impairment, the politics of charity, community and collective culture, the built environment, and empowerment. This course fulfills the English Major 1700-1900 requirement.

This course offers a theory-driven exploration of the literature on disability in the Romantic and Victorian eras. In this class, we will read Romantic and Victorian texts alongside modern disability theory (chapters and articles) to develop a disability studies lens as a critical approach. We will study Romantic and Victorian texts in dialogue and in topic groups. Key topics will include physical disability; deformity; communication disabilities; and dwarfism. Although intended as a companion course to Romantic and Victorian Disability, this class can be taken as a standalone. There is no overlap between the classes, and they can be taken in any order.

This course traces the gothic short story in British and American literature from the 19th century to the 20th century. An important popular genre, the short story is a distinctive lens through which to view gothic literature's preoccupation with social, psychological, political, scientific, and moral issues. Key topics will include: vampires, revenants, and ghosts; trauma gothic; gothic bodies and body parts; American gothic; suburban gothic; gothic spaces; the uncanny; queer gothic; and medical gothic. There is also time devoted to ‘weird fiction’ as a gothic adjacent genre. Through class discussions and written assignments, students will work on close-reading and critical thinking skills and discover the work of a variety of authors. As this is a close-reading class, students will usually read one short story or two very short stories for each class period. PLEASE NOTE: If you took this course as a USEM you CANNOT take this as a 400000 level course.

“Believing in Jane Austen” can mean several things. It can mean believing that her fiction has value today, 250 years after her birth. It can mean entering into her fictional worlds as if they were real—despite their sometimes unrealistic endings. It can evoke her representations of characters who hold beliefs of various kinds, with various degrees of intensity. And it can suggest larger questions of the relationship between literature and belief, both on and off the page. We will address these and other facets of the course theme by reading at least four of Austen’s novels along with writings by several contemporaries that can help us understand the nature and stakes of belief in her work. We will also approach the topic through a selection of film adaptations and possibly some of the (hilarious) fiction she wrote as a teenager. The assignments will be various and will build on class sessions devoted to discussing the craft of (believable) writing.

This course explores literature, culture and the arts toward the end of the nineteenth-century. The emphasis is on British materials, with some special attentions to Oscar Wilde, the most famous literary figure of this so-called fin de siecle (French for "end of the century"). But the course also surveys the period's kaleidoscopic array of personalities, movements and themes--both national and international. We encounter artistic and social innovations; radical political philosophies and schemes; debates concerning women's roles in the public sphere; new understandings of human psychology and altered mental states; various sexualities and an emergent medicalized sexology; theories of race, evolution and degeneration; and Britain's increasingly complex colonial and imperial involvements. In addition to long and short fictions, poetry, and essays, we will look into art history, book history, and other cultural formations. Longer fictions beyond Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray might include Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four, Robert Louis Stevenson's novella Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Sara Jeannette Duncan's novel of British India Set in Authority. Students may choose among two different assignment structures for papers, with each structure sharing some smaller tasks: one option is to create four short papers over the term; the other option, which will have a midterm declaration deadline, involves writing two short papers and also one longer and more research-intensive paper, the latter counting as two short papers but carrying its own guidelines and criteria.

Sometimes called the ‘English Malady’, madness in the long 19th century was an unstable term, subject to shifting definitions, and encompassing many different mental states. This course examines the role of madness in the Anglophone literary tradition, and how that tradition intersects with medical accounts and psychiatric survivor experiences. There is much debate in the period over the behavioral and physiological indications of madness, and even whether it could be diagnosed at all. The scholarly fields of disability studies and mad studies ask important questions about the kind of cultural work that madness does. This course explores the language and cultures around madness, melancholy, hysteria, monomania and other conditions in the context of contemporary debates on gender, normalcy, and social order.

The period of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries represents the onset and consolidation of English (later British) colonial rule in Ireland and sees the breakdown of the old Gaelic social and political orders. This course will examine how the Irish-speaking world reacts to this trauma by focusing on the evolution and development of some key ideas: those of heritage, nationhood, civility and freedom. These concepts will be examined within their historical and literary contexts, Irish, British, European and American. We will closely examine original texts written in Irish, English and Latin especially, from the perspective of both English colonizer and Irish colonized. All materials will be read in English translation.

"Dramatic genius... is kindling over the whole land." (Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine review; 1823) This class approaches British Romanticism through the spectacular fecundity of its staged drama, which is not usually considered in conventional assessments of the period. Alongside serious, often disturbing new tragedies, hilarious new comedies, and stunning revivals of Shakespeare, Romantic theater offered frenetic audiences a staggering range of experimental or fringe genres such as melodrama, Gothic drama, nautical drama, pantomime, and quadruped entertainments featuring live horses in cavalry charges and the herics of "Carlo the Wonder Dog" and "Jocko the Brazilian Monkey." We will explore the ingenious ways, both in print and on stage, playwrights utilized these and other stage practices to engage with the burning political issues of the time: the French Revolution, slavery, imperial might and global strife, women's rights, among others. Readings address major canonical figures-- Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron—as well as less well-known figures who ruled the stage, such as Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Inchbald, "Monk" Lewis, and Hannah Cowley.

If you know anything about the Victorians, you probably think of them as uptight and judgmental. That was certainly how the people who became their children and grandchildren saw them. But their preoccupation with correct moral behavior was for them the pursuit of heroic ideals. They dreamed of grand actions undertaken out of commitment to noble principles and the common good. This class will involve the intensive reading of four Victorian works that express Victorian longings for a goodness big and glamorous enough to be almost mythic. We'll read two narrative poems: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, about a woman's formation into a poet and Alfred Lord Tennyson's Victorian adaptation of Arthurian legends Idylls of the King. We'll also read two Victorian novels, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and George Eliot's Middlemarch, which associate the romance of doing good with the romance of the marriage plot. We'll also sample from a wide variety of Victorian economic, political and scientific thought that complicated the Victorians' longing for goodness. Along the way we'll confront the same questions the Victorians did: What are your obligations to your community? Should only local injustice matter to you? Does the definition of goodness depend on historical context? When is commitment to ideals a form of integrity and when is it fanaticism? Is the world simply too complex for individual goodness to matter?

This course introduces students to the Victorian short story (1837-1901). Areas of focus will include the history and development of the short story as a prose fiction form, the print and publication market, and the many subgenres, such as the gothic tale, detective story, folk tale, and science fiction. The short story is a distinctive lens through which to view the Victorian era’s preoccupation with social, political, scientific, and moral questions. Through class discussions and written assignments, students will examine the formal qualities of the genre and develop their knowledge of the key debates of the period, such as economic and political progress and unrest; nostalgia; empire; religious controversies; decadence and the women’s movement. The majority of the readings are by British writers. There is no crossover with the Gothic Short Stories course.

This course explores liberalism (and its alternatives) in Britain during the Victorian period. Although that might sound neat and compact, much of the course’s interest will emerge from learning that it is quite the opposite. Liberalism in general is a highly multivalent and evolving term, deployed in diverse and often confused ways across domains of literature, politics, law, religion, and more. Students can expect several kinds of frame-working that will send us outward from Victorianism in both historical scope and geography—outward into matters such as imperialism and colonialism (notably in South Asia, the Caribbean, and the “Irish Question”), and historical affairs that need attention from the start of the 19th Century and into the 20th Century. Even within the Victorian period, liberalism undergoes some dramatic shifts in its applications. Literary readings include such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, and H.G. Wells. We will also explore period essays or book selections by writers such as J.S. Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Bagehot, Herbert Spencer, and more. Finally, latter-day scholarship will support our primary texts and issues along the way. Coursework will involve ungraded reading journals, two short, graded mid-term papers, and a longer final paper with a research component.

During the nineteenth-century, Irish authors crafted some of the most iconic novels of the Gothic genre: Melmoth the Wanderer, Uncle Silas, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula. That authors from Ireland – with its atrocity-haunted past and rich folk culture – produced such works should come as no surprise. What is surprising is that the most famous of these novels do not even mention Ireland. Did these authors find escape from Irish problems by setting their fiction abroad or did they conceal their native land in the subtexts and allegories of their transplanted works? This course will explore the variety of ways Irish authors utilized the grotesque, the fantastic, and the otherworldly as vehicles for exploring culture, identity, and history. Works of Irish Gothic fiction not only profoundly impacted popular culture but also influenced the critical tradition, challenging scholars to develop new methods to engage with the narrative strategies of these strange creations. Examining world-famous novels alongside lesser-known works that more overtly engage with Irish culture and society, we will evaluate how Irish authors utilized the Gothic genre to explore both regional and universal fears, anxieties, and trauma.

Using the life and career of Oscar Wilde as our focus, we will examine the literary and cultural aesthetics of the fin de siècle. As an aspect of the Aesthetic and Decadent movement of the late 19th century, Wilde's work celebrates l'art pour l'art, even as it looks forward to modernism. The subversive subject matter of Wilde's art and his hedonistic lifestyle revolts against Victorian sensibilities and allows the reader to explore the celebration of beauty under the threat of decay. An accomplished Irish playwright, Wilde's oeuvre also includes poetry, essays, short stories, and his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde's ill-fated and obsessive relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, "Bosie," led to three public trials—one civil trial where Wilde sued Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, for libel, and two criminal trials where Wilde was tried for "gross indecency," convicted in the second trial, and sent to HM Prison Reading with two years hard labor. In this class, we will read a range of Wilde's texts alongside authors of the Aesthetic and Decadent movement. We will investigate how the poetry, prose, and theatre of this period—with particular concentration on Wilde's texts and the theatre of his public trials— influenced twentieth artists around the Atlantic. We will also consider how the social and sexual transgressions of Wilde's life and his work impacted twentieth century attitudes towards performance, race, gender, and sexuality.

Sensational Fictions investigates the development of crime fiction in England and the US from the Victorian era through the twentieth century. We will begin with the genre’s origins in Victorian sensation fiction and the explosive popularity of Sherlock Holmes, moving on to the Golden Age of the clue-puzzle mystery in 1920s England, the emergence of the hardboiled detective novel in 1930s America, and the postwar rise of the police procedural. We will look at all of this fiction in its historical contexts—the expansion of the British Empire, the First World War, Prohibition, and the Great Depression—as well as its cultural contexts (including Victorian pseudoscience, modern advertising, the emergence of psychology, and others). Authors will include but are not necessarily limited to: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and P.D. James.

This course will treat Oscar Wilde extensively, looking to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, several theatrical works, his short stories, and other writings before and after his period of imprisonment for “homosexual offenses.” In addition, we will explore his milieu in the decades surrounding his career, from productions by male and female writers and artists ranging from work by John Ruskin and Walter Pater through works of the Fin de Siècle to Modernism, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Students will therefore come to see Wilde contextually in a maelstrom of Fin de Siècle and early 20th-Century developments, including women’s rights, the “Irish Question, and socialism/anarchism. Graded work will center on short papers and also regular reading journals (the latter of which are not graded individually but in the aggregate over the term.

How do writers talk about the city, and why do they talk about it in the ways that they do? This course will survey the global history of urban literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, supplementing that history with insights and conceptual tools drawn from urbanism, human geography, philosophy, and cultural studies. We will examine the effects of industrialization, imperialism, world wars, decolonization, deindustrialization, neocolonialism, secular stagnation, and climate change on the shape and experience of urban life as it is recorded by writers around the world – be they realists, naturalists, modernists, postmodernists, or pulp writers. We will follow in parallel the development of urban life and the development of urban literatures over the course of the twentieth century, familiarizing ourselves with the material history of the city, the literary history of city writing, and the intellectual history of theorists of space. Likely authors include: Charles Baudelaire, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Chinua Achebe, Georges Perec, James Baldwin, Eileen Chang, Zoe Wicomb, Xi Xi, Phaswane Mpe, Dorothy Tse.

Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland (1924), a study of the Irish-language literature in the eighteenth century, was intended to address what its author saw as a serious gap in Irish historiography to that point: the exclusion of sources originally in the Irish language from the understanding of the country’s history. He effectively invented a “concept”, that of an Ireland to which the majority of the population belonged but which had nonetheless been excluded from its “official” Anglophone history. The course will investigate the relationship between Irish- and English-speaking society in eighteenth-century Ireland as expressed in both literary and non-literary texts; we will also discover that Corkery’s original polemic continues to have surprising relevance today.

When war comes, many might imagine that theatre and other forms of performance stop. But, among the many forms of resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a vast increase in the number of new plays representing the suffering and the resilience of the Ukrainian people, many of which have already been translated into English. There has, in contrast, been less attention paid to other forms of performance writing: for example, poetry being created for, or disseminated through, digital media, reaching audiences instantly with all the urgency of the moment. This course has as its central aim the exploration of these materials, both ones already in English translation and ones that might become available. It seeks to understand what has been created and how it is disseminated as cultural practice during the Russian invasion. It will run as a classroom on the Notre Dame campus, meeting simultaneously with one taught in English at the Ukrainian Catholic University, enabling collaboration and shared learning between ND and UCU students.

The modernist feminist writer Virginia Woolf lived and worked with a loose collective of writers, painters, and social thinkers that we call the "Bloomsbury Group," though many members of the group disliked the phrase. We will look at the novels, essays, art, and political writings of some of the members of Bloomsbury - Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and others - to explore the complex moments of cross-fertilization, critique, and revision that define their encounters. In addition, we will attend to a few areas that have dominated discussions of Bloomsbury modernism: ideas of nation, "civilization," and critiques of Empire; the formation of literary modernism's often tense relation to mass culture; the development of modern discourses of sexuality; the relationship between literature and the modern metropolis; and explorations of women's "experience" of modernity. Because members of the Bloomsbury Group worked in a number of fields beyond the literary - painting, economics, social thought, publishing, and interior design to name a few - students will find that they can easily develop projects that engage more than one area of interest.

In this course we will look at the relationship between gender politics and national politics as it plays out in the development of Irish fiction after the era of James Joyce. Focusing on Irish novels and short stories which were groundbreaking and/or controversial in terms of their exploration of gender and sexuality, the course will also investigate the historical contexts in which they were produced and the controversies they produced. Our investigation will focus on the question of how the 'trouble' generated around these controversial explorations of gender and sexuality relates to other kinds of trouble that have shaped the history of twentieth century Ireland. We will begin with the reaction against government censorship in the Irish Free State during the 1930s and 1940s, follow the emergence of Irish women writers and Irish feminism from the 1950s to the 1980s, and conclude with the rise of openly LGBT Irish writers in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Students will write two essays and participate in one in-class presentation.

In this course, we will examine the relationship between national and sexual politics through our study of gender and twentieth-century Irish drama. Beginning with the first controversies surrounding the representation of women on the Irish stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, we will study representations of gender and sexuality in the major canonical figures of the Irish renaissance--W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey--while investigating lesser-known female and queer Irish playwrights from that time such as Lady Augusta Gregory, Lennox Robinson, and Teresa Deevy. We will also look at how the treatment of gender and sexuality changes in the work of postwar and contemporary Irish playwrights, including Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Anne Devlin, Frank McGuinness, and Marina Carr. Along with the plays we will study their historical and cultural context and the sometimes quite vehement responses that these plays evoked in their audiences. Students will write three papers and do one in-class presentation.

This course will focus on the last 120 years in literary history, zeroing in on one particular problem - the writing of religious poetry - in order to probe the philosophical convergences and collisions that resulted in what we now call our "post-secular" era of thought. Beginning with Gerard Manley Hopkins at the end of the nineteenth-century, and major modernists who continued to write powerfully after WWII - T.S. Eliot and David Jones - the syllabus will chart a course through the rapidly changing poetic forms of two further generations of poets working devotedly, if differently, out of various religious systems of belief. The many dilemmas of postmodernity include redefining the very notion of "belief" (versus "faith") after the secular revelations of science and modernity; we will explore the theoretical issues involved in order to better understand what's at stake for each writer we encounter, among them also Mina Loy, Muriel Rukeyser, Brian Coffey, Wendy Mulford, Fanny Howe, Hank Lazer and Peter O'Leary. We will ask, among other things, why ancient mystical frameworks seemed newly hospitable, for some, in the face of postmodern suspicions about language and institutions, while for others embracing the sciences renewed faith. We will consider the crucial input of Judaism in Christianity's re-thinkings of language and religious experience, as well as consider how issues of nation and gender inflect changing relationships between poetry and religion. Students will emerge conversant with the major debates in contemporary literary theory as well as with developments in contemporary poetry; no prior expertise in reading poetry is necessary for this course. Each will develop their own particular approach to our issues through the writing of a reading journal and one paper, and each will be responsible for co-leading of class discussion thrice in the course of the term. Students who have taken Professor Huk's University Seminar in their first year should not sign up for this course, which works with too many overlaps in reading.

Storytelling allows us to make a place, and a past, come alive, and it is through narrative that certain people, locations, and experiences lodge themselves in our memories. How, and why, do we reshape our own environment to convey certain stories about our past, our accomplishments, and our collective experiences? Why is it that road-trips loom so large in American cultural memory, and what do they have in common with other placelore stories, such as those featuring Native Americans, Irish saints and TV characters like Northern Ireland's "Derry Girls"? How can words, sounds and imagery be used to map out and draw us into new and often fantastic virtual geographies? In this class, we will think about how stories gain power by being anchored in evocative depictions of specific places, both real and imagined. We will examine verbal and visual stories, from medieval manuscripts like the Book of Kells and tales of St. Patrick's travels around Ireland, to contemporary animation (Song of the Sea), murals from Northern Ireland, place-based television series (Derry Girls) and Chicago-based road-trip films (The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller's Day Off). We will contemplate how icons of ancient Ireland were used to create new spaces in Chicago, and we'll look at the massive 1893 World's Fair that put a newly rebuilt Chicago on the world map, as well as dramatic histories of Chicago and some of its murderous inhabitants (Devil in the White City). We will also turn to regional storytelling traditions and will study songs and stories about "home" composed by those who experienced diaspora and migration.

This course will explore women as producers (journalists, editors, illustrators) and consumers of modern periodicals including little magazines like The Little Review, slick magazines like Vanity Fair, fashion magazines like Vogue, women's domestic magazines like Good Housekeeping, feminist papers like Votes for Women or The Freewoman, and more. We'll pay special attention to modern women writers who made their living writing for magazines - Djuna Barnes, Rebecca West, or Jesse Fauset, for example - and explore the ways in which modern periodicals (both "big" and "little") considered the rise of modernism in relation to changing gender roles and feminist concerns. Since the periodical press has been called the medium that best "articulates the unevenness and reciprocities of evolving gender ideologies," we'll consider changing articulations of "modern" femininity in a wide range of periodical genres. We'll learn how to read modern periodicals from various angles, taking into consideration reception, circulation, seriality, temporality, illustration, and advertisement, and we'll meet the modern woman journalist and her close relations: "sob sisters," "agony aunts," "stunt girls." We'll be exploring new digital archives for the most part to access these early twentieth century publications. We will also read one novel in installments throughout the semester to more closely participate in the serial reading practices that would have organized an early twentieth-century reader's relationship with her favorite publication. Assignments will include one group presentation and linked essay, one essay of 8-10 pages, and a few shorter exercises.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the literary imagination across the world was seized by a sudden onset of radical experiment and innovation. This aesthetic revolution not only changed the idea of what novels could do, but offered new ways of understanding the self. The explosion of literary masterpieces in these decades expanded the possibilities of what art can do, and remain cultural touchstones to this day. In this course we will read a selection of novels from places such as Paris, London, Dublin, Vienna, Prague, New York, and Berlin. Authors may include some of the following: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, John Dos Passos. Works not written in English will be read in translation, and the course will also include films.

This class looks at how women's voices emerge in Irish literature/art from the bloodthirsty warrior queens and powerful sovereignty goddesses of medieval saga to today's activist punk poets and videographers, exploring both how women are represented by others and how they choose to answer back. We will consider key genres of Irish verbal art in a wide range of compositions from medieval to contemporary. We will be helped along by relevant literary, anthropological and cultural criticism. How do women speak? How do "women" speak? Are these works subversive of our expectations or conservative in their relation to the status quo? How can we acknowledge and deconstruct misogyny not as inevitable but as historically and contextually conditioned and subject to demystifying critique? What vantage can we gain on Irish literary history by asking these historical, theoretical and political questions? How do tradition and the canon look when we view them through a gendered lens? What kind of impersonations might we engage in when we read...and write? Genres considered include courtly love poetry, contemporary feminist verse, oral lament, modern love poetry, bardic verse, storytelling, early modern allegorical poetry, folk song, medieval allegory, and contemporary comic verse, all read in English. Your own work for the course will include papers of literary/cultural analysis, a presentation, and a creative writing option for those who want to flex those muscles.

This course will explore novels and short fiction (mainly British) written between 1880 and the middle of the 20th century, a period organized by dramatic shifts in cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Experimental, middlebrow, and popular novels attempted to represent the modern through depictions of new sorts of subjects: New Women, suffragettes, flappers, sapphists, typists, war workers, and more. Attention to these figures will give us an opportunity to notice how modern fiction engaged the texture of modern life through representations of free love and divorce; of reproduction, birth control, and abortion; queer sexuality; domestic and paid labor; and more.

Is it possible to think of the 21st century as a post-racial, post-feminist world? In her provocative 2012 study, Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, Janell Hobson suggests that rather than having been eradicated, millennial hopes that the historical difficulties represented by race and gender have lost their significance in the present day are as far, if not even further away from the mark as they have ever been. For Hobson, policing the body, whether that be in terms of its race, its gender, or its sexuality, has remained paramount. "[W]hile the early-twenty-first century discourse of 'postracial' and 'postfeminist' often declares the loss of meaning attached to race and gender," she argues, "..the global scope of our media-reliant information culture insists on perpetuating raced and gendered meanings that support ideologies of dominance, privilege, and power." In Hobson's view, the body and how it is imagined rests at the center of such ideologies, pointing also to a number of crucial questions that become particularly important when considering the significance of race and gender through the lens of modernity. How might a reconsideration of race point also to a rethinking of gender and vice-versa? What does race actually mean? How does/can it alter the way we understand gender? Is it possible to think race beyond the idea of race? What might a new conception of race actually look like, and how might this influence our thinking on gender? How are the problems of race and gender intertwined, and how is/has the body been imagined in and through them? What can such questions tell us about today's racial and gendered realities, both inside and outside the university, both in the past and the present? This course takes a step backward to investigate these and other like questions in the context of the utopic impulse and its emphasis on the imagination in several 19th-century American authors whose work may be viewed as participating in a broad yet under-acknowledged vision of race, gender and Atlantic modernity that seeks to interrogate hierarchies of race and gender as these have been constructed and maintained within dominant ideologies. Grounding our analysis in a number of 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century political philosophical texts on law and utopia and drawing on insights from critical race theory, gender studies, feminist theory, theories of law and literature, and utopian studies, our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of our racialized past and its troubled link to questions of gender both then and now, so that we may better hope to imagine - and reimagine - the shape of our collective democratic future in the 21st century's global community. Course Texts: To be determined, but will most likely include some of the following, either in their entirety or in the form of relevant excerpts: Plato's Republic; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince; Thomas More, Utopia; Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis; James Harrington, Oceana; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, Or The Natural Power of Kings; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or The Discourse on Inequality; Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Frances Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance; Moncure Conway, Pine and Palm; Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy; Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces or Of One Blood; Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. Course Requirements: To be determined, but will most likely include two five-page essays, an oral presentation and two or three digital projects.

Life-writing is a capacious term that can be used to describe a variety of private and public statements about the self. Some of these are easily recognizable as representations of subjectivity (for example, memoirs, diaries, letters, self-portraits, graphic novels) and some less so (for example, legal testimony, blogs & vlogs, social media posts, resumes, medical forms have been read as part of the complex project of articulating subjectivity). Life-writing also positions itself at the intersection of fact and fiction (in autofiction) or the convergence of critical and creative (in autotheory or autocriticism). This course will attend to a wide variety of forms of life-writing and visual self-representations in dialogue with auto/biographical theory and theories of the subject in order to trace shifting notions of what counts as a self. A broad range of critical approaches to subjectivity and definitions of the autobiographical project will assist us as we attempt to map changing notions of the self. Writings may include works by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel, Bobbie Baker, Maggie Nelson, works on life-writing drawn from auto/biography studies and theories of the self/subjectivity. Assignments will include writing critical essays of various lengths that examine primary materials in dialogue with works of criticism, keyword assignment, and in-class group projects. Note: as this is not a creative writing course, we will not be producing creative non-fiction, but there may be opportunities for brief critical/creative projects.

What, and how, do writers create in the aftermath of a crisis of capitalism? How do we study the literature of our present moment and very recent past? This course explores the experimental Irish literature which flourished in the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crash. Students will gain an understanding of the Irish modernist tradition and the realist novels that flourished during the prosperous years of the "Celtic Tiger", before diving into close analysis of the modernist-influenced novels of the 2010s, including Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Mike McCormack's Solar Bones and Anna Burns' Milkman, and ask where this modernist "Movement" went next by looking at even more recent Irish novels. Students will also examine the material economic circumstances of literary production, as they discover the role of small, Arts Council-supported presses and magazines in revitalising Irish writing after the crash.

Climate change and environmental destruction, police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement, economic collapse, fear of epidemic disease: these may seem like new problems, but they have deep roots. Starting in the 1830s, a generation of young revolutionaries--rebels, dreamers, and freethinkers all--banded together under the name "the Transcendentalists," determined to remake America into a beacon of justice for the world. Inspired by the American Revolution and European Romanticism, these men and women--including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott--launched a daring movement to reinvent American literature, religion, and philosophy, abolish slavery, found women's rights, and fight against economic inequality, social injustice and environmental destruction. Did they succeed? Yes! Their legacy is everywhere in our literature, politics, education and environmentalism. Did they fail? Yes, that too: the Civil War they themselves helped ignite destroyed their dreams and discredited their idealism. That's the dilemma: both answers are correct. We live today with the consequences of both their failures, and their successes. How can their works and dreams speak to us now, in our own moment, when the problems they faced seem all the more intractable?

Wherever we place it in the pantheon of great plays and in spite of Tolstoy's loathing of it, King Lear is a very extraordinary play. This course will explore its extraordinariness by concentrating on it unremittingly. It will do so in two steps. For the first half of the semester we will slow-read the play together, thinking about anything and, insofar as we can, everything that it provokes us to investigate, from Shakespeare's sources to early stagings and revisions, from its views on power, gender and the spiritual to its verse and vocabulary, and so on and on. In the second half of the semester we will engage with the play in performance and reimaginings through film versions and a variety of adaptations from Nahum Tate to Jane Smiley and beyond.

This course will explore how civic life has been represented in classic American fiction. We will take up questions of form and style as they relate to distinctive visions of US citizenship in Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Henry Adams's Democracy: An American Romance (1880), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995). Several of these novels are quite long, so be prepared to do a good amount of reading. Course requirements include regular attendance and consistent high-quality participation; presentations and/or group work; and a mix of short and longer writing assignments totaling around 25 pages.

Ever since Nora Helmer walked out on her husband and slammed the door in Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House, modern drama has been closely connected with the struggles to redefine gender and sexuality that have shaped the twentieth and twenty-first century. In this course, we will look at how this story plays out on the American stage, as we examine the works of American playwrights who have participated in the many long-running debates about gender and sexuality in modern and contemporary America. We will read both canonical modern playwrights - Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, etc. - and a variety of contemporary playwrights, including but not necessarily limited to Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, David Mamet, Sara Ruhl, Melissa George, and Susan Lori-Parks. Students will write at least two papers, keep a journal, and give at least one in-class presentation.

This new course highlights literary works written in the 40 years after the American Civil War, spanning the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. The era's fiction was remarkably innovative, and writers from the U.S. took their place on a global stage in a way rarely seen before. We will explore the riches, reading major novels by Henry James (Portrait of a Lady), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Kate Chopin (The Awakening), Charles Chesnutt (The Marrow of Tradition), Simon Pokagon (Queen of the Woods), and Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth). Short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett ("A White Heron") and Charlotte Perkins Gilman ("The Yellow Wallpaper") will round things out. The end of the Civil War produced abiding conflicts over race and questions about the future of American democracy, which we will consider in works by Walt Whitman (Democratic Vistas and selected poetry), along with selections from the postbellum writings of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching journalism. This volatile period of territorial expansion, income inequality, domestic political and racial conflict, large-scale immigration, and rising international influence transformed the United States from a largely homogeneous and agrarian society to a version of what it is today. We are living in what is sometimes described as a "Second Gilded Age," while Reconstruction has become the subject of renewed attention in connection with the persistence of racial injustice. The historical context, and its parallels with the present, will provide an animating framework for our close readings of the literature. There will be around 25 pages of writing, with specific assignments tba at the beginning of the semester. Participation—possibly including an oral report—will also factor in the final grade.

Coronavirus in China, wildfires in Australia, locusts in East Africa, melting poles, rising seas, the insect armageddon, the sixth extinction, droughts and floods of Biblical proportion ... Welcome to the "End of Nature" and the beginning of the Anthropocene! For just when we're being told that "Nature" is at an end, nature seems to be everywhere, invading our headlines and intruding into our lives in sudden and unexpected ways. Not long ago, we could still think of nature as a peaceful retreat from the stress and din of society, a resource for healing, and a refuge from the traumas of history-whether it be an afternoon's gardening, a day hike nearby, a weekend fishing trip, or a summer's outing to a faraway National Park. But that was the nature of the Holocene, the geological epoch that, according to the latest science, ended as recently as the 1950s. Today, in the Anthropocene, nature is roaring back into our lives and shaking the very pillars of our society-as if The End of Nature, in Bill McKibben's 1987 book title, were more truly the end of the world. But perhaps what this panic tells us is that our world has always been intertwined with nature, both actually and conceptually, in ways we have forgotten to remember, ways that the current revolt of nature is forcing us to confront. This course will inquire into the strange ways that modernity has, over the last 200 years, modified and transformed our notions of Nature, even as our technological explosion has leveraged the power of humanity from regional to planetary scales. This course, therefore, travels from the Holocene of our recent literary heritage to the Anthropocene within which we are all living today-although only some of our literature explicitly takes up this fact. Altogether we are now left with one great question, as we look toward our future: Since we can't survive without nature, how can we learn to survive with it? Readings will be drawn from poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, from Emerson and Thoreau, through American "Naturalism" and such "nature writers" as Aldo Leopold and Annie Dillard, to the recent writings of Jeff Vandermeer, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez and Richard Powers. Along the way we will be guided and provoked by such philosophers and theorists as Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh. Students will write two short papers and one longer paper involving research as well as personal observation and reflection.

According to several popular narratives, Artificial Intelligence is either about to be the most transformational influence on human culture since the Industrial Revolution, or an over-hyped set of diffuse technologies and systems with only superficial relation to each other. In this course, students will consider AI from several different disciplinary perspectives in order to make sense of both the narratives and the science surrounding it. These perspectives include computer science, the history of technology, philosophy, AI ethics, and science fiction. By taking up these different perspectives, students will develop vocabularies for talking about AI and, importantly, for thinking about its future.

In spring 2021, Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro published Klara and the Sun, a novel featuring an intelligent machine, or "artificial friend" humanoid robot as its protagonist. Ishiguro's novel asks serious questions about the nature of intelligence in an era of machine learning and automation. In this seminar, students will take up these questions, and look specifically at how we tell stories about technology to answer them. Working with fiction by Ted Chiang and Nnedi Okorafor, representations of AI in television and film from Westworld to Ex Machina, and analyses of the implications of AI and machine learning in cultural and scientific texts, we will debate one of the central issues of contemporary technological life.

Have you ever tried to think about books by making one? Included handwriting as the subject of your literary analysis, or ink? Have you ever wondered how much the authors you study were thinking about the paper you’d be holding when you pick up a book? This course is a celebration of book technologies in American literature. We will undertake a comparative study of print, type, paper, and letterforms from early American letters to the contemporary “post-print” era. By doing so, we will explore why our love of books, paper, and print has returned so dramatically at the same time that digital reading technologies and platforms have proliferated. In texts by authors including Phillis Wheatley Peters, Emily Dickinson, and Benjamin Franklin we will study early encounters with print and other writing technologies. Moving to the contemporary period, we will read fiction and poetry obsessed with print legacies, by writers like Susan Howe and Ruth Ozeki, and will also look at contemporary artists and communities like the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective who are reframing print histories and practice as collaborative and pedagogical. The course uses an experimental structure: we split the weeks into intensive literary seminars and hands-on workshops. Students work with letterpress, learn basic bookbinding techniques, and work with early and late innovations in the book arts. At the heart of our explorations will be the intense relationships that literary works have cultivated with their own materials and techniques of production. Creative and critical assignments.

In this course, we will discuss debates surrounding the “Great American Novel,” including examples on and off the syllabus. Why don’t we begin with Moby-Dick or The Last of the Mohicans, you might ask? Why The Sound and the Fury and not Absalom, Absalom!; and, for that matter, where is Henry James on this syllabus? Does the Great American Novel have to be a hefty tome, or can it be shortish? Does it have to engage with lofty ideals or can it be thoroughly ensconced in everyday life? Is it national, anti-national, or regional? How does it approach the problems of universality? This course will offer a broad examination of novels that might contend for the title of the Great American Novel, while also taking a thorough look at each individual example. As a result, the course will be a mixture of lecture and seminar discussion, with an attention to how books were historically received as well as how they resonate (or don’t) in the present moment. We’ll be reading some books that have long been considered Great American Novels—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, and Beloved, for example—as well as books that might cause us to reconsider the very idea of a Great American Novel in the first place.

Generative AI is a form of computing in which computer systems generate media such as text, images, sound, video, or combinations based on prompts or other information provided to the computer. These systems, including, but are not limited to, ChatGPT, Midjourney & DALLE, have been evolving rapidly and have led to extreme excitement, confusion, and fear. This course provides a survey of how to understand and use a number of these tools including explorations in prompt engineering as well as addressing issues from across the liberal arts including artistic, economic, social/psychological, educational and legal concerns and opportunities.

In this course we will undertake a comparative survey of the materialisms of twentieth-century American naturalist novels, tracing a trajectory from turn-of-the-century texts by Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, to the neo-naturalist fiction of a few decades later that operated alongside developments in modernist literary form (Gertrude Stein, Ann Petry, John Steinbeck), and concluding with a look at its postwar resurgence in the novels of authors such as Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy. We will also discuss the return to these novels in recent films including There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.

In this course, we will deploy critical and creative modes of inquiry as we undertake a survey of mid- to late twentieth-century American poetry arising from New York City, which in the postwar period became a nexus of literary and artistic experimentation. It is within this geographic and historical framework that the New York School of Poets coalesced around the core figures of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Focusing on this dynamic array of poets as well as their precursors (e.g., Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca), fellow travelers (e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Frank Lima), and subsequent "generations" of New York poets (e.g., Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer, John Yau), we will consider how lines of affinity and intimacy as well as the cultural reverberations of the city drew together writers so diverse in outlook and method that Ashbery remarked, "our program is the absence of any program." In this light, to figure out what it means to be part of the this anti-programmatic community, we will explore how the New York School intersected with the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, the Boston and San Francisco Renaissances, the Nuyorican Movement, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry—prompting us to consider how the concept of an avant-garde becomes, in this period, a ramifying network of friends, lovers, and intellectual rivals engaged in aesthetic cross-pollination. Our undertaking will be attentive to the intermedial dialogue between these poets and New York painters (e.g., Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher), methods of collaboration, the influence of postmodern theory, and how race, gender, sexuality, and place shaped what has been cited as one of the most enduringly influential bodies of literature in the postwar world. Assignments will engage students' critical and creative talents.

What does it mean to be human at a time when we constantly exceed our humanity, whether through technological advancement, or with artificially intelligent machines, or in our ambitions to escape our own bodies, to become part of the "singularity"? This course examines recent works of literature and film that take up such issues, that ask what it means to be "human" through the lens of the posthuman, the transhuman, and the inhuman. Although these texts are often classifiably "science fiction," they are particularly intriguing because none of them seems so farfetched or beyond the realm of possibility - and so, among the themes of the course will be the notion of near-contemporary futures, alongside questions of the uncanny, the commodification of human lives, performance and authenticity, and, as befits a literature course, the question of genre and representation. Course texts will include fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, and Tom McCarthy, as well as films like Spike Jonze's Her, Stephen Spielberg's A.I., and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even a sampling of episodes from television series such as Black Mirror and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.

What happens when poetry goes public? What can poems do in the world? And how do matters of urgent public import - matters of race, gender, class, war, and environmental collapse - shape the patterns of feeling and thought that poems make possible in the private recesses of our hearts and minds? These are just some of the questions we'll take up in this survey of modern and contemporary American poetry. Our goal is to explore the past 120 years in verse by framing poems as performative, contagious, sometimes clamorous, always thoroughly social things: textual objects produced in and for particular communities of readers, built to travel on the tongue and in a variety of media, and often tasked with vital public work. From the modernist scandals of Dada New York to Amanda Gorman's celebrated inaugural poem in 2021, our inquiry will pivot around key moments in U.S. literary history when poets transfixed and transformed public audiences. Central figures are likely to include T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Claudia Rankine, and Layli Long Soldier, but we'll read widely (and closely) across movements, schools, styles, and forms. As we wrestle with popular narratives about poetry's cultural position in the U.S. (from handwringing concerns about poetry's obsolescence to recent hype over the flourishing of poetry in digital spaces), we'll also engage landmark statements from a variety of critical perspectives on the social life of poetry. Ultimately and together, though, we'l come to our own conclusions about why poems matter, and where poetry is headed in the twenty-first century.

Discussions of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century literary and cultural movement of modernism often center on those qualities of the movement described in the work of early modernist literary critics, such as Harry Levin or Edmund Wilson. Such examinations emphasize the modern movement's experiments in form, structure, linguistic representation, characterization, etc., while paying much less attention to the role of the modernist movement in the larger context of a given culture. In this course, we will explore the significance of the modern movement from the perspective of American culture, as well as the manner and meaning of American literary participation in the movement. To that end, we will consider not only the work of authors generally accepted as modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein; we will also consider the role of authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank, of the early Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925), and a number of authors from the Harlem Renaissance. We will examine the work of these authors not only in the context of modernism, but also as it relates to many issues of the day, including progressivism, primitivism, race and ethnicity, immigration, cosmopolitanism vs. regionalism, and the importance of the vernacular, in addition to the question of "Americanness" and its importance to an understanding of American literature during this time. Considering these different vantage points in American literary modernism, we will try to imagine the contours of "American modernisms," and draw some conclusions about their significance within the larger modernist context. In so doing, we'll seek to arrive at a more comprehensive, more nuanced perspective on the meaning of the modern in American literature and culture.Course Texts: Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence; Willa Cather, O Pioneers!; Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter; Waldo Frank, Holiday; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Ernest Hemingway, Torrents of Spring; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Jean Toomer, Cane; William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! Course Requirements: Two 5-page essays, two 5-page drafts, and a presentation.

What was American modernism, and what is it today? How do we think about modernism then and now, and what are some of the changes it has undergone since the advent of what has/have been called the "new modernism(s)?" What uncommon modern American voices are brought to light by this understanding? What this course will explore the contributions to American modernism of two less conspicuous modern moments - the Chicago Renaissance of 1912-1925, and the Harlem Renaissance of 1920-1929 - in addition to the more traditional understanding of American modernists as represented by those authors belonging to the "Lost Generation". In "engendering renaissance," these two moments suggest a literary birth and rebirth of modern American identity that reconfigures the idea of Americanness within and opens the door to the larger and more varied cultural fabric that is modern America(s). By locating the rise of American modernism in the relation between these two literary moments, this course will broaden our understanding of the idea of Americanness at this time in literary history by considering how it is created within a frame determined by the interplay of race, gender, class and nation. In this way, it seeks to deepen our understanding of early 20th-century American culture and Americanness as it developed in the U.S., while at the same time suggesting new contexts in which to engage them in the 21st. Course Requirements: two 5-page papers, group presentation, several short in-class writing assignments. Course Texts: Required texts may include Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"; Jose Martí, "Our America"; Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark; Waldo Frank, Our America; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America"; Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South, excerpts; Jean Toomer, Cane; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing.

US literature and popular music between the mid-19th century and the end of World War II. This interdisciplinary course will incorporate methods from performance studies, sound studies, and musicology in addition to literary criticism. We will read key works of American prose (as well as some poetry) from the period's principal literary movements, including realism, naturalism, modernism, and multimedia documentary. We will also listen to musical works--Broadway tunes and blues songs, spirituals and symphonies. We'll pay particular attention to how segregation and other racial politics, changing roles for women, and the mass production of commodities influenced the art of this period. Texts will include writing by Stephen Crane, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Harriet Jacobs, and Edith Wharton, as well as music by George M. Cohan, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Paul Robeson, and Bessie Smith. Course requirements will include two argumentative essays, several shorter writing assignments, regular online reading responses, and active class participation.

In this seminar, we will read work from key periods in the 20th century in America when social and political progress seemed to slow and even reverse. How did people use culture to express their desires, disappointments, and disillusionments? Is disappointment a generative political practice - and, if so, what can it bring into being? What, if anything, does all of this have to do with hope? We will discuss fiction and poetry, journalism and memoir, music and film, and classics of psychoanalytic and feminist theory. Authors and artists will include Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Nina Simone, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and David Wojnarowicz. Course requirements will include two substantive essays (one involving outside research), presentations, and active participation in online and in-class discussions.

Designed for English majors, this cross-disciplinary course is an invitation to thinking about contemporary freedom of expression as it has been reshaped by technosocial, economic, and legal features of the digital age. We will approach the topic through case law, short fiction (including near-future speculative fiction), cinematic and televisual works, political philosophy, and the history of mass media. Among the subjects of scrutiny will be: the purpose of free speech in pluralistic democracies; intersections of law, literature and technology; the counter-majoritarian First Amendment; disinformation and propaganda; hate speech; platform governance and emerging information architectures; parody, satire, copyright, and intellectual property. The course may be of special interest to those considering the application of an English major to the study of law or careers in media and technology.

This course offers an entwined introduction to digital literatures and the history of computing. Our approach to both subjects is animated by one common question: how might we imagine the world otherwise? As we explore a range of digital literary works, including hypertext narratives, interactive fictions, poetry robots, video games, and net art, we'll also examine what these artifacts reveal about the social life of computing technologies. By studying how computing and network technologies have developed over time, as well as how they work, we'll consider what kind of technological future we want, and how to build it. Indeed at the heart of this course is an exercise in creative world-building, an endeavor that will require us to move beyond bright-eyed optimism and paralyzing pessimism both toward an up-close, critical examination of the technologies and platforms that shape our lives together. Class meetings will include discussions of theoretical readings, examinations of creative work, and explorations of computing tools and methods (including hypertext, digital media, and programming fundamentals). Over the course of the semester, students will develop a host of original projects: critical essays, new media stories, and new worlds. To be successful in this course you must: tinker, play, build, make, tweak, experiment, hack, and break things. You will push your boundaries and the boundaries of your tools, ask many questions of yourself and your peers, be confused and/or frustrated and/or lost, dig yourself out of those traps and think deeply about computation and its infrastructures. This course is not about gaining mastery of particular tools, but rather building the skills and experience that will allow you to be comfortable and confident engaging with and evaluating new and familiar technologies. Familiarity with specific technologies or programming languages is NOT a prerequisite for this course.

Native Americans have long been trapped in a betwixt and between state, caught by the forces of past and present, tradition and assimilation, romanticization and caricature. Yet through it all, Native voices have continued to speak of the Indian experience with great power and eloquence. This course will introduce Native American literature as a distinctive contribution to American and world literature. We will examine a wide range of expressive culture from the last century, including novels, poetry, graphic stories, children's literature, film, digital media, autobiographies, performances of oral literature, and music. Through the passion, creativity, and humor of Indian authors, we will learn something of the historical experience of Native men and women, and how they have reacted to massacres and mascots, racism and reservations, poverty and political oppression. Above all, we will try to understand how indigenous authors have used literature to engage crucial issues of race and culture in the United States that continue to influence their lives: identity, self-discovery, the centrality of place, cultural survival, and the healing power of language and spirituality. Class discussions will incorporate literary, historical, and ethnographic perspectives of Native expressive culture and the agency of authors as artists and activists vis-à-vis the wider American literary tradition. Authors include Sherman Alexie, Nicholas Black Elk, Louise Erdrich, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Winona LaDuke, and Leonard Peltier.

In this class, we will explore various American migrant communities and discuss the many facets and difficulties of American identity. What are the benefits and drawbacks of migratory movement? What should one's relationship be to assimilation? What does migration do to the idea of one's homeland? Although we will be working chronologically, our progress will be atypical. This circuitous route through the literature in this class will be a literary journey that echoes the various movements of people in the United States. Potential authors we read may include: Sui sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, Sanora Babb, William Saroyan, Carlos Bulosan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tomás Rivera, Arturo Islas, Julia Alvarez, Fae Myenne Ng, Chang-rae Lee, Janet Campbell Hale, and Tommy Orange.

This course will examine the broader sweep of twentieth and twenty-first century African American poetics through the study of approximately eleven particularly influential poets. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Indignant Generation, Black Arts, and Post-Black Arts eras as historical backdrop, we will explore the evolving poetics these poets pursue, as well as their attending politics. We will also address essential questions at the core of our critical enterprise: What constitutes African American poetry? Why do blacks write poetry in the first place, and to what end? What are the critical issues animating critical discourse on black poetry? How and where might African American poetry develop into the twenty-first century? Poets for the course will include Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Lucille Clifton, Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown.

Since the eighteenth century, parallels have been drawn between the enslavement of African Americans and the marginalization of Irish Catholics in Ireland. In 1792, the Belfast newspaper the Northern Star published "The Negroe's Complaint" and "The Dying Negro" in an attempt to draw sympathy for enslaved African Americans and to also suggest that the Irish were metaphorically "slaves" in their own country. In 1845, during his lecture tour of Ireland, Frederick Douglass wrote, "I see much here to remind me of my former condition," suggesting that what he witnessed of the beginning of the Famine could be compared to slavery in the United States. Comparisons made between the Irish and African Americans continued through the twentieth century with writers from both cultures gesturing towards each other in literature. In this course we will explore African American and Irish literature. We will examine how black and Irish writers have gestured towards each other in literature, as well as the ways in which these two cultures have intersected - their shared experiences - while also focusing on important differences between the two cultures.

Advanced Fiction Writing is an advanced workshop for students with a serious commitment to writing fiction. This course will look to examine contemporary conversations regarding race, diaspora, trauma, and ecological disaster, for us to - as Chris Abani notes - redress the art of an existential wound. We will read a range of contemporary authors, either story collections or novels. Discussions will also include contemporary publishing practices, placing work in literary journals, and pursuing writing beyond undergraduate study i.e., graduate programs. By reading as practitioners of the art of fiction, students will engage in productive critiques via antiracist workshop practices and lead class discussion framing. The emphasis will be the individualized reading of student work with the goal to refine their authorial "voice."

What is it about poetry that's kept it pulsing like a secret, irresistible current through human culture for thousands of years? To answer this question, we'll read classical, canonical and contemporary poetry from around the world, and we'll see what happens to poetry as it moves through various media and forms-- from text, voice and performance to video, voice over, visual art, drama, sound technology and recordings. We'll write in response to what we discover, and, of course, write, workshop and revise our own poems in a supportive, generative and dynamic environment. By the end of the course, you will be able to articulate your own working definition of what poetry is, and where it's going, and build a portfolio of poems exemplifying your vision.

This course is intended for students who have already taken Advanced Fiction Writing and who are seriously interested in writing fiction. Advanced Fiction Writing is an advanced workshop for students with a serious commitment to writing fiction. This course will look to examine contemporary conversations regarding race, diaspora, trauma, and ecological disaster, for us to - as Chris Abani notes - redress the art of an existential wound. We will read a range of contemporary authors, either story collections or novels. Discussions will also include contemporary publishing practices, placing work in literary journals, and pursuing writing beyond undergraduate study i.e., graduate programs. By reading as practitioners of the art of fiction, students will engage in productive critiques via antiracist workshop practices and lead class discussion framing. The emphasis will be the individualized reading of student work with the goal to refine their authorial "voice."

This course is intended for students who have already taken Advanced Fiction Writing and who are seriously interested in writing fiction. Advanced Fiction Writing is an advanced workshop for students with a serious commitment to writing fiction. This course will look to examine contemporary conversations regarding race, diaspora, trauma, and ecological disaster, for us to - as Chris Abani notes - redress the art of an existential wound. We will read a range of contemporary authors, either story collections or novels. Discussions will also include contemporary publishing practices, placing work in literary journals, and pursuing writing beyond undergraduate study i.e., graduate programs. By reading as practitioners of the art of fiction, students will engage in productive critiques via antiracist workshop practices and lead class discussion framing. The emphasis will be the individualized reading of student work with the goal to refine their authorial "voice."

While taking a hemispheric approach to black writing, this course will examine the creation of the black first person through autobiography. Taking up classic texts from across the Americas and the Caribbean, such as Biography of a Runaway Slave, Child of the Dark, The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Black Boy, we will explore the multiple ways in which black writers create the black rhetorical self. Why is the black "I" ubiquitous across African American writing of the hemisphere, and what are its implications in relation to race, gender, class, and community? What does it mean for a black narrator to announce her or himself as author or speaking subject? What does it mean to speak or write oneself into the public's consciousness, and why does it matter? What are the constitutive elements of a black rhetorical self, and how might they differ from other racial/ethnic identities?

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison is one of the most important American novelists, essayist and literary critics of the 20th Century. She is known for her complex and nuanced portrayals of the African-American experience within the African-American community from the days of slavery to the present. Less well known is Morrison's nonfiction and her contributions to an African-American Literary theory which she has used to engage authors as diverse as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin. In this course students will read Morrison's first six novels (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz) as well as her major work of literary criticism (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) and a collection of her nonfiction (What Moves at the Margins). Students will have the opportunity to develop sustained research projects on the works of Morrison and to draw upon Morrison's literary theory to analyze a broader set of texts in classic and contemporary American literature.

The 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro encourages a new generation to explore the life and work of James Baldwin (1924-1987). Directed by Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro is a provocative documentary that envisions a book Baldwin never finished by providing insight into Baldwin's relationship with three men who were assassinated before their fortieth birthdays - Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In this course we will interrogate questions of race, sexuality, violence, and migration. Our current political moment encourages the examination of these issues while Baldwin's life and work provides the ideal vantage point for their investigation. Using I Am Not Your Negro as our starting point, Baldwin's life and work will allow us the opportunity to explore transatlantic discourses on nationality, sexuality, race, gender, and religion. We will also explore the work of other writers including Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Globally, the late 1960s were volatile and deadly. A decade that began with young idealism and revolutionary possibilities, ended with raised fists and the beginnings of violent terror. 1968 was particularly transformative. It was the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; the year that the Chicago Eight were arrested for conspiracy and inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention; the year that students across France brought the French economy to a halt; and the year that demonstrations in Northern Ireland demanding equal representation for Unionists and Nationalist escalated. In this course we will examine the political, religious, and cultural events of 1968-69 by exploring texts that were created during that period, and texts that have been created since to reflect the era. We will focus our attention on theatre, literature, music, and art created in the United States and Ireland that captures how class, generational, gender, religious, and racial conflicts led to bloody violence.

In practically every country in Latin America that had significant populations of enslaved Blacks, post-emancipation politics attempted to write Blacks out of the national narrative, thus limiting Blacks’ claims to equality and political participation. “Afro-Latin American Literature and Culture” begins with several fundamental questions: How do Black artists wield art to make claims to inclusion in their local and national communities? What is art’s relation to history and the racial national narrative? Can the arts ameliorate material conditions and racial politics? To pursue these questions, this course will explore the multiple forms of cultural expression created by Black creatives and their communities in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America. Focusing on Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, this course will read literature by Black writers from each country as well as examine the religious practices, dance, music, food, graphic arts, and film that shape and reflect these Black communities. Artists will include Luz Argentina Chiriboga, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, Gloria Rolando, Esteban Montejo, Nancy Morejón, Alfredo Lam, and ChocQuibTown.

In practically every country in Latin America that had significant populations of enslaved Blacks, post-emancipation politics attempted to write Blacks out of the national narrative, thus limiting Blacks’ claims to equality and political participation. “Afro-Latin American Literature and Culture” begins with several fundamental questions: How do Black artists wield art to make claims to inclusion in their local and national communities? What is art’s relation to history and the racial national narrative? Can the arts ameliorate material conditions and racial politics? To pursue these questions, this course will explore the multiple forms of cultural expression created by Black creatives and their communities in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America. Focusing on Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, this course will read literature by Black writers from each country as well as examine the religious practices, dance, music, food, graphic arts, and film that shape and reflect these Black communities. Artists will include Luz Argentina Chiriboga, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, Gloria Rolando, Esteban Montejo, Nancy Morejón, Alfredo Lam, and ChocQuibTown.

This course examines how historical, political and cultural violence shape language, narrative, and collective and individual identities, and considers art as a form of transformational testimony. In this class, we will ask: How do writers and artists navigate the invisible restrictions placed on speech in order to translate the pain of war, forced migration, and state sanctioned violence into language? How have writers and artists productively challenged grammars of denial and the politics of erasure? How do literary and artistic practices confront the challenge of displacement, subjugation and cultural erasure by creating new sites of memory, knowledge production, and visions of reconstruction? We will read literature from Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, China and beyond and study visual art, films and performance pieces that engage with and respond to state-sanctioned violence, document the psychic, spiritual and material consequences of displacement, and generate new visions of identity, community and nationhood in an increasingly global world.

In the summer of 1946 French cinemas were flooded with the likes of The Maltese Falcon, Laura, and The Woman in the Window, films that had been delayed for international distribution because of the war. When Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton saw these American films made during the war, the critics decided that the films and their characters were "black" or "dark," thus defining the genre as film noir. In this genre, the mostly white characters occupy an indeterminate space, commit moral transgressions, and border on nihilism. In discussions of the noir genre, films and novels by and/or about black people are marginalized. Novels such as Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go or Donald Goines's Never Die Alone complicate the genre because the works are black in ideology and essence. These characters do not need to fall from grace to be black, they are black and, consequently, the pursuit of duplicitous lifestyles in black noir works tends to highlight the social injustices black Americans suffer in America making many black noir titles protests against mainstream white America as well.In this course, we will study black American literature that focuses the noir genre on black people themselves. Gritty, urban crime novels that attempt to expose inequities in black American lives and dispel the notion that a descent from whiteness results in blackness. Rather, the black people in these texts exist in darkness because they are living in alienated communities. We shall investigate how the noir genre is altered when "noirs" are the subjects and the authors. In addition to primary texts, the course will also engage critical responses to these works.

This class will take as its points of departure Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature and Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, pairing literary history with economic history to investigate the aesthetics, pragmatics, and sociology of world-literary production, circulation, and reception, over the past (long) century. We will consider racial capitalism and ethnic literature, social reproduction and the precarisation of the publishing industry, underdevelopment and the literary prize system, amongst other problematics. Our goals are to consider two prominent periodising frameworks for understanding cultural and material history in relation to one another, to extend, revise, or dispense with these twinned frameworks where they seem to us to fall short, and to produce critical analysis of literary works that either apply these frameworks or can answer criticisms informed by them. Primary texts will include works by Achebe, Chang, DeWitt, Kuang, Machado, Plaatje, and Pramoedya; secondary texts will include works by Arrighi, Auerbach, Brouillette, Chow, DuBois, Irele, Ngai, Rodney, Schwarz, and Tanoukhi, among others.

The novel might have always been global, emerging as it has alongside the massively expanding circulation of people, ideas, and commodities that characterise the past five hundred years of world history. But the past century has seen the rise of novels that are self-conscious about their global-ness, even as political and intellectual currents have tended towards focusing on the regional, linguistic, national, and other particularities of cultural production. This class will consider a range of modern and contemporary novels, critics, and theorists from around the globe and through them consider the relationships between specificity, particularity, generality, and universality in global literature. This will serve as an introduction to topics in transnational, postcolonial, world-literary, and global anglophone literary studies, and as an occasion to deepen those debates.

In this course, we explore questions of gender and sexuality across a range of cultural contexts to ask: what, if anything, makes social identities different in the global south and the global north? What might it mean to feel strange––and in whose eyes might someone appear strange? What do we even think strangeness is? We’ll explore how theories of gender and sex intersect with recent queer and trans fiction and nonfiction from the global south, and if they might offer theoretical frames of their own. Readings will include work from Agha Shahid Ali, Akwaeke Emezi, Ismat Chughtai, Carmen Maria-Machado, Virginia Woolf, and theory from Sara Ahmed, Paul B. Preciado, Susan Sontag, Alok Vaid-Menon, and others.

This course focuses on portrayals of the environment, energy production and climate change through fiction. It opens with an overview grounded in William Morris' late 19th century utopia News from Nowhere. After this, it takes the publication of J. G. Ballard's Drowned World and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 as a year zero for contemporary environmental fiction and criticism, and moves forward to environmental fictions of the present day. It considers conservationism and energy extraction, fictions of nuclear terror and fallout, the aesthetics of the Anthropocene, and environmental utopia and dystopia. The course examines a wide range of genres and media: there are realist, science-fiction, fantasy and literary fiction texts, in media such as film (including movies from the Mad Max series), graphic novels (When The Wind Blows), and video games (Final Fantasy VII) alongside written literature. Key titles include Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic parable The Road, Ursula K. LeGuin’s environmentalist science fiction The Word for World is Forest, and Jeff VanderMeer’s “weird fiction” eco-horror Annihilation.

What if a poem is written in prose, if it makes use of collage, or if it is etched into a block of stone? What if a story eschews language in preference to pictures or if it is only a sentence long? What if something appears like writing, but its swoops and loops across the page belong to no language known? How do we make sense of things that resist our attempts at categorization? In this critical-creative course, which blends the scholarly rigor of the seminar and the expressive possibilities of the writing workshop, we will explore diverse modes of literary intermediality and cross-genre hybridization through the complementary practices of theory, textual analysis, and creative experimentation. By reading exemplary works across historical periods and linguistic traditions and then applying what we learn to our own work, we will gain a comparative understanding of a broad range of aesthetic provocations, including prose poetry, flash fiction, comics, lyric essays, somatics, concrete and visual poetry, graphic fiction and wordless stories, asemic and automatic writing, and more. We will study and draw inspiration from the hybrid forms of such luminaries as Sei Shōnagon, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Joseph Cornell, Truman Capote, Etel Adnan, William S. Burroughs, Joe Brainard, Yoko Ono, N. H. Pritchard, Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, C. D. Wright, Patti Smith, Wayne Koestenbaum, Don Mee Choi, Claudia Rankine, CAConrad, Maggie Nelson, Terrance Hayes, Monica Ong Reed, and Layli Long Soldier, among others. Assignments will engage students’ analytical and creative talents, as we dwell in the spaces of possibility that exist between and beyond generic boundaries.

A survey of the period of writing from1900-2025 that will start in the colonial moment with EM Forster, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Mulk Raj Anand, Rabindranath Tagore; pass through the history of decolonizing movements with post/colonial poets Mohammed Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the Bandung conference and its attendant writings, and early novels of decolonization; to the heyday of the postcolonial novel with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Arundhati Roy, and close it out with global anglophone fiction including The Parisian by Isabella Hammad and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai. Along the way, we'll be reading key debates in postcolonial studies - subalternity, migrancy, exile - and the shift from postcolonial studies to global anglophone literature now.

Certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.

This course serves as an introduction to the ways in which the Holocaust has been remembered and examined through literature, from early survivor narratives to second-generation works and the recent culture wars in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Although the course will provide a very brief introduction to the historiography of the Holocaust, our main focus is on close readings of various literary works. That is, we will study how trauma is mediated, transformed, and communicated through written works. Contingent upon funding, the course will include a study tour to Berlin and to Auschwitz, where we will visit memorials and documentation sites, speak to representatives of Jewish organizations, and get a better sense for the continuities of Jewish life in Central Europe throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All expenses for this study tour will be covered by the University, and students must be able to commit to the entirety of the trip.

A directed reading is the equivalent of a regular English course in terms of assigned reading and writing. The student and faculty advisor determine the reading list and writing assignments. It may not duplicate an existing course. Students must complete the required forms in order to receive permission to take the course.

Independent study under the direction of a faculty member.

This course offers students the opportunity to work on a faculty member's research project. The faculty member must write a description of the research project, the specific work to be completed by the student, and the method of assessing the student's work. To receive three credits the project should involve the equivalent of the work in a three-credit English course. Students may count no more than one ENGL 48000 towards the English major.