English

The English Department offers courses that foster critical thinking about the relationships among literature, culture, and history. Students of English become adept critics of poetry, novels, essays, and plays. They develop knowledge of the history of literary culture and about the evolving genres, forms, and ideologies of literary expression. They study the relation of literary texts to their historical contexts, and they learn to read both literary and non-literary texts critically. As they develop their knowledge, students of English hone their skills as critical writers and explore their potential as creative voices.

ENGLINB Indian Baccalaureate Credit

Offering: Host
Grading: Transfer
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

ENGL111F 21st Century American Literature (FYS)

This course will explore American literature of the 21st century and in so doing, we will consider the portrayals of race, class, ethnicity, religion, trauma, citizenship, migration and sexuality. We will approach these portrayals in engaged class discussion as well as in writing, both analytical and creative. We will also discuss the ways in which these authors conceptualize and problematize American identity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL112F Reading Black Culture (FYS)

Blackness is the lifeblood of the culture industry. U.S. popular culture--which traverses national boundaries due to the workings of imperialism and global capital--has a predominantly Black face, at the same time that Black people, in the United States and across the globe, are made to live in unrelenting proximity to death and destitution. This introductory course aims to tackle this seemingly contradictory state of things by considering the manifold ways Blackness circulates in the global cultural landscape. With the ultimate aim of increasing cultural literacy, we will engage with key questions such as: What makes a Black text? What, if any, political duty does the Black cultural worker have to the larger "Black community"? How does a critique of capital figure into Black culture? How might we conceptualize intellectual work as central to Black cultural traditions? This course traces these questions through the analytic of "reading"--as a mode of critical engagement that exceeds the textual. We will contend with Blackness in its varying permutations and figurations across the domains of literature, music, film, sport, visual art, and performance.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM112F
Prereq: None

ENGL113 A Nation of Immigrants?

America is a nation of immigrants. This ideological epithet has come to define the American experience as one of opportunity, advancement, and national incorporation. This course will approach this narrative from the perspective of im/migrants, refugees, exiles, displaced persons, and colonized minorities. To do so, we will read sociology, history, and political theory alongside literary texts, inquiring into discourses of migration, mobility, and (un)belonging through an interdisciplinary and intersectional lens.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT113
Prereq: None

ENGL113F A Nation of Immigrants? (FYS)

ENGL121F Are You a Feminist? (FYS)

Taking our cue from Beyoncé and the debates her music has produced, this First Year Seminar investigates the meaning of feminism by considering how writers, artists, activists, academics, and public intellectuals discuss the topic. Students' curiosity about feminism - as topic, politics, identity, and practice - will guide class meetings where we will discuss readings by prominent feminist writers, scholars, and critics. Students will leave the course with a clear sense of themselves as writers and thinkers, as well as an understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, and other social identities and of the multiplicities of feminisms in our contemporary moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: WRCT121F, AMST121F, FGSS121F
Prereq: None

ENGL123Z Love, Sex, and Marriage in Renaissance Europe

This seminar compares literary depictions of love, sex, and marriage from the 14th to the 17th centuries by writers from England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and Sweden. (N.B. Students will be able to study writings from other parts of Europe over the course of the semester should they so choose.) We will read texts composed by women and men in genres including poetry, theater, the short story, the essay, the maxim, the travel narrative, and the sermon. Though the seminar is focused on literature, we will also consider painting, engravings, sculpture, and the decorative arts (e.g., wedding chests). We will explore questions such as: How were love and marriage related during the Renaissance? What roles did sex, gender, race, class, and violence play in relationships between couples and within society, and how were they represented in literature and art? How do gender and genre affect the ways in which love, sex, and marriage are depicted? How did cultural differences influence writers' and artists' interpretations of love, sex, and marriage? And what about "homosexual" love, same-sex unions, and depictions of dissident sexualities and genders? Finally, how do contemporary (21st-century) writers reimagine Renaissance representations of love, sex, and marriage, and why do Renaissance texts and images matter today? Other topics will include virginity and celibacy, friendship, erotic literature and pornography, religion, family and class structures, and divorce. This seminar engages students with university-level research by navigating search engines and databases (beyond a Google search!), honing their analytical skills, and polishing their academic prose. Students will also have the opportunity to write creatively should they so choose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L123Z, COL123Z, FGSS123Z, MDST125Z, WLIT249Z
Prereq: None

ENGL131B Writing About Places: Africa

This course is one in a series called "writing about places" that explore the long tradition of writing about travel and places and changing attitudes toward crossing cultural borders. We will examine historical and cultural interactions/confrontations as portrayed by both insiders and outsiders, residents and visitors, colonizers and colonized--and from a variety of perspectives: fiction, literary journalism, travel accounts, and histories. Writing assignments will include critical and analytical essays as well as encouraging students to examine their own experiences with places and cultural encounters.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: CGST131B
Prereq: None

ENGL132 Writing Medicine and the Doctor-Writer

In this course students read a range of works across a variety of literary traditions, mainly by writers who were also medical practitioners (including Chekhov, Bulgakov, Lu Xun, William Carlos Williams, and Che Guevara), but also nondoctors who write compellingly about medically related subjects (Camus in THE PLAGUE, Tracy Kidder on Paul Farmer, and Anne Fadiman on cultural clashes).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: CGST132
Prereq: None

ENGL135 Writing about Research: U.S. Style

This course is designed to prepare non-native speakers of English to write about research in U.S. academia. Students will focus on the structure, cohesive devices, citation styles, and academic vocabulary commonly used in literature reviews, theoretical papers, and primary research studies. As a topic of common interest, example readings will focus on language research including statistical analyses of language learners; anthropology studies of how gender, race, and socioeconomic group affect language; and overviews of theories about language acquisition. Throughout the course, students will learn organizational skills for longer papers, summarize numerical and theoretical data, and practice the mechanics of writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT135
Prereq: None

ENGL141F The Revolutionary Rupture: Slavery, Latifundio & Rev. in Caribbean & Lat. Amer. Lit. & Cinema (FYS)

The word "Revolution" often evokes a vertical and/or eruptive image: a standing militant who was once a "premodern," non-European figure; a bottom-to-top explosion of imperial and colonial disorder and normative violence; a rising and world-overturning wind or "natural event." Does the eruption of an "event" worthy of the name "Revolution" begin on the imagined x-axis, say, of the earth's surface? Or does it point beyond that plane of seemingly commonly shared life? Or to that notion itself--i.e., commonly shared life--as a question? How do configurations of hell, heaven, God, Satan, the dead--what's below, what's above--come to bear in representations of "Revolutions"?

In this course, we will slow down, read, and work through these and other questions and figurations on the verge, in the midst, and/or seemingly on the other side of revolutionary ruptures--ruptures which are also returns. We will read select literatures and cinemas of Haiti, The Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Cuba that convey refusals of "given" life and death and that render different imperial, colonial, and neo-liberal systems of oppression and their attendant philosophies of the human, non-human, animal, native, enslaved, and blackened. The Haitian Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century, insurrections in Chiapas before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and 20th-21st century armed movements against U.S. economic and military invasions of the Caribbean and Central American regions would be the historical "flashpoints" of the course. While de-romanticizing the commercialized Che-t-shirt notion of "Revolution" in the U.S., we will, more importantly, encounter and deconstruct discourses of hetero-masculinity, modernization, mestizaje, whitening, and "development" that sometimes appear radical and/or revolutionary.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM141F
Prereq: None

ENGL143L Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

This course explores theories and teaching methods related to learning English as a second language (ESL). Students will critically examine current and past "best practices" for teaching ESL and the seminal theories they are based on. In addition, we will discuss the various needs of English language learners coming from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, at varying levels and varying ages. As a service-learning course, students will have the opportunity to actively work with ESL students at SAWA, a refugee organization, or Beman Middle School. They will be asked to apply the theories and pedagogical techniques they are learning to their sessions at the school and reflect on their experience. They will also critique ESL textbooks, give teaching demonstrations, and add resources to the Wesleyan English Language Learners (ELL) Program.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT140L, EDST140L
Prereq: None

ENGL150F American Crazy: Four Myths of Violence and National Identity (FYS)

Among the industrialized nations of the world, the United States has long had unusually high levels of crime, violence, and imprisonment. This course will explore five especially prominent cultural explanations for American violence. We will consider the origins of these explanations in American myth and history, and we will investigate their appearance in literary expression, journalistic reporting, popular culture, and social science.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL152F The Armchair Adventurer (FYS)

At the turn of the 20th century, stories of travel, action, and adventure enjoyed enormous market success and cultural prominence. This course examines the interaction between the adventure stories told in popular genre fiction--science fiction, historical romance, detective novels, children's literature, stories of overseas adventure, etc.--and their "high" literary cousins. We will read classic works of genre fiction in order to understand the appeal of these stories and storytelling modes, for both writers and readers, and to identify their generic structures, plots, and premises. And we will examine how prestige-oriented fiction drew from, adapted, and altered these conventions.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL156F Contemporary American Literature (FYS)

This course will explore contemporary American literature by focusing on novels written by Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, Tommy Orange, Ocean Vuong, Mbue Imbolo, Edwige Danticat, and a play by Lynn Nottage. Extra readings will include poems and short stories. We will consider the portrayals of race, class, ethnicity, religion, trauma, citizenship, migration, and sexuality in these works, as well as the ways in which these authors conceptualize and problematize American identity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL157F Caribbean Literature and Writing the Environment (FYS)

This is a writing and reading course in which students will use Caribbean literature focused on the environment and the environment around them as starting points for writing of their own.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL161F Captive and Confined: Literatures of Imprisonment (FYS)

Is it more than just a metaphorical turn of phrase that causes us to speak of being held captive by works of literature and art? Or are there links between writing, reading, and being imprisoned that are as material as they are psychological? Our class will consider the relationship between spaces of confinement and writing to explore how various writers have used writing to respond to various states of captivity. Is carceral writing particularly captivating to readers, and if so, why? We will read texts about prisons (physical and psychological), as well as texts written in prisons, to explore relationships among writing, power, literacy, and freedom.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL162 Poetry Lab

The Poetry Lab is intended for first-year students interested in literature or creative writing. Come join us for a semester of hands-on experiments with the stuff of poetry--interpreting and translating but also taking apart, writing over, scrambling, collaging. Throughout, we will ask big questions: What is poetry, anyway? How and why do we read it? We will read some of the most powerful poems in the English tradition and explore how modern poets speak back to them or make new poems from their pieces. We will engage with important scholarly debates and encounter different theoretical and methodological approaches, inviting us to approach poetry as a self-enclosed artifact, as historical evidence, as a kind of thinking, or as political action. But we will also constantly tinker with poems, imitate them, creatively play as we investigate the fundamental workings of language and meaning.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL162F The Past and Present of American Journalism (FYS)

This course will expose students to the history of print culture in the United States and familiarize students with the current state of affairs in American journalism. Each week we will read historical and contemporary texts alongside one another, seeing how recent journalism continues in the tradition of older forms of public writing but also deviates from and altogether abandons them. Some of the assignments for the course will be critical, asking students to describe, explain, and make arguments about the texts they encounter; others will be creative, asking students to generate their own journalistic practices informed and inspired by the assigned readings.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL163F Literature of London (FYS)

This course examines the role of London in the literary imagination of 19th-century Britain. A vibrant multiclass and multiethnic jigsaw puzzle, London was a "world city" at the center of the empire, the seat of crown and parliament, and a place of both danger and opportunity. In addition to being the economic and political center of Great Britain, some authors viewed London as the nation's narrative center as well. Together, we will explore how writers depicted the city, how they envisioned the relationship between urban living and modern life, how they understood London's inhabitants and their plots, and how they placed the city in networks of stories reaching around the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL165F Querying the Nation: American Literature and Ethnic Studies (FYS)

This course poses the study of American literature as a way to explore issues of race and ethnicity in the United States. From 1960s student strikes demanding ethnic studies courses in California to recent dismantlings of the field in some high schools and colleges, the role of ethnic studies in education has been a topic of heated debate. We will examine a range of multiethnic texts to understand how they have generated critical frameworks for cultural study that are attuned to the contradictions of various American ideals. Toward the end of the course, we will direct some of our energies to investigating how ethnic studies has circulated at Wesleyan.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL175F Staging America: Modern American Drama (FYS)

Can modern American drama--as cultural analysis--teach us to reread how America ticks? Together we will explore this question as we read and discuss some of the most provocative classic and uncanonized plays written between the 1910s and the present. Plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Mike Gold, workers theater troupes, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Arthur Kopit, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Ayad Akhtar, and others will help us think about what's at stake in staging America and equip us as cultural analysts, critical thinkers, close readers of literature, and imaginative historians of culture and theater. This seminar will introduce first-year students to the kind of critical thinking developed in majors such as English; American Studies; African American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; College of Letters; Theater Studies; and the Social and Cultural Theory Certificate.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST125F, AFAM152F, FGSS175F, THEA172F
Prereq: None

ENGL176F August Wilson (FYS)

During his lifetime, the world-renowned African American playwright August Wilson graced stages with award-winning plays from his "Century Cycle." This course examines the cycle's 10 plays in the order in which the playwright wrote them, from JITNEY (1982) to RADIO GOLF (2005). In all cases, we pay special attention to the playwright's presentation of language, history, memory, religion, visual art, and music within his oeuvre.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: THEA175F, AFAM177F
Prereq: None

ENGL178F The Literature of Business, and Vice Versa (FYS)

This course will consider some of the ways that business, markets, and commercial enterprise have been depicted in American fiction from the 19th century to the current moment. Our focus will be on the ways that writers sought, at various stages in history, to understand the changing features of capitalism. At the same time, we will consider the development of the American publishing industry and the ways that it influenced literary production and literary values.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL190F Place, Character, and Design: Techniques in Writing Nonfiction and Fiction (FYS)

We begin this writing course with questions central to students' work in both nonfiction and fiction: how to establish characters and a narrator's voice and how to frame the spatial and emotional world of the piece. The course encourages students to explore questions of design and structure while focusing also on style and technique at the sentence level. This creative writing course explores features of narrative and design that are central to work in fiction and creative nonfiction. We will also compare the design of college papers, written for academic courses, with pieces written for general readers. Readings include works by writers interested in these questions, including, in fiction, Andre Aciman, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Robert Stone, Deborah Eisenberg, and Edward P. Jones, and, in nonfiction, Brian Doyle, Junichiro Tanizaki, Joan Didion, Charles Bowden, Mark Doty, Linh Dinh, Dubravka Ugresic, and George Orwell.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL200 The Narratives of Illness and Recovery

This course provides a detailed examination of primarily first-person accounts of illness and recovery. The focus will be on narratives that deal with mental illnesses and trauma or the psychological aspects of physical illnesses. We will explore the relationship of story and narrative to the healing process. Students will analyze across texts the common psychological traits that lead to recovery and generativity, as well as the response to loss and the experience of suffering. Particular emphasis will also be placed on the role of "the wounded healer," those persons who have suffered and then choose to assist others who face similar predicaments.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL200
Prereq: None

ENGL201A Ways of Reading: Originality and Its Opposites

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL 201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

Believe it or not, the idea that a work of art should be unique, new, and inventive has a history, and it's a fairly recent one. In this section we will read novels, poems, and plays that embody or somehow resist the ideal of originality. We will start with theories of originality that emerged at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, and with contemporaneous texts that exemplify that aesthetic philosophy. Then we will turn to originality's many opposites: translations, collaborations, adaptations, forgeries and hoaxes, parodies, hymns and vernacular songs, and works that are so conventional or derivative as to fail the originality test. Throughout, since this is a section of "Ways of Reading," we'll pay attention to our expectations, experiences, and strategies as readers as well as to developing skills in discussing and writing about literature.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201B Ways of Reading: Unreliability

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit. In this "Ways of Reading" course we will examine how notions of unreliability and indeterminacy shape literary writing and interpretation alike. We see this most obviously in the figure of the unreliable narrator in fiction, but we also grapple with the (un)reliability of poetic speakers in lyric poems. In fact, unreliability might as well be another way of naming and representing subjectivity. Learning to recognize and parse signs of subjective and/or unreliable accounts is a keystone of literary analysis because it helps us make sense of--and take pleasure in--how the story is told in addition to the content of story. Conversely, some literary texts turn the mirror on us (the readers); that is, they prompt us to reevaluate how our own assumptions, biases, and blind spots figure in our interpretations of texts and dynamics. In this course, students will read and write about a wide range of literary genres including novellas, short stories, lyric poems, and plays that thematize unreliability, confusion, and misprision. In so doing, they will learn to develop their own interpretations of literary texts and craft compelling and nuanced arguments.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201C Ways of Reading: Texts and Territories

ENGL201D Ways of Reading: Stories and Storytelling

In this section we will read literary, philosophical, and scholarly works that explore stories and storytelling. Some of the questions we will consider are: what makes a story a story? What are its building blocks? How does it matter if a story is told in verse or prose, in a book or onstage, orally or in print? What human, personal, and societal needs are served by telling and consuming stories? How do literary texts incorporate or represent the activities of telling stories and of listening to, reading, and watching them? We will define and examine foundational aspects of literary narration, including first-person and third-person narrators, events, plot, voice, and setting and worldbuilding. We will also practice and develop skills in literary analysis and interpretive, scholarly writing.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201E Ways of Reading: Gifts, Debts, and Promises

ENGL201G Ways of Reading: Contact Zones

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

In this course, our studies of 20th- and 21st-century works will focus on how various forms of "contact"--interracial encounters, travel and migration, genre mixing, etc.--produce literary tensions that comment on broader social and political worlds. In addition to analyzing texts from a range of genres, we will situate them in their historical contexts, approach them from a variety of critical perspectives, and examine how literary expressions of "contact" shape perceptions of the contemporary world.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201H Ways of Reading: Influence, Imitation, Invention

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit. Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life. This "Ways of Reading" course will consider how works of literature respond to one another, imitating and departing from what has come before. We will learn to identify a writer's stylistic, rhetorical, and generic commitments, and we will develop a set of technical and conceptual approaches to reading to generate a facility and ease with the practice of close reading. At the same time, we will remain alert to the influence of historical, geographic, and social contexts on the production and reception of works of literature. As responsible readers, we will combine attention to a text's formal properties with an awareness of its situatedness within worlds--and literary histories--outside the text.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201J Ways of Reading: Literary Form and Forms

ENGL201K Ways of Reading: Borrowing and Stealing: Authorship and Originality in Literature

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

This course will explore the meaning of authorship and originality in literary study. What does it mean to be original within a literary tradition? How do genres retain their coherence while also enabling originality? When does inspiration become plagiarism? Where do we draw the line between borrowing and stealing in literature? What legal, ethical, and historical frameworks help us to distinguish between them? How do such norms vary across genres and media? This course will focus on the different ways that poetry, fiction, and drama foster the recirculation of particular plots, figures, and formal structures while still maintaining the value of originality. We will pay particular attention to the crises of authorship that mark what Walter Benjamin famously called the "Age of Mechanical Reproduction." But we will also look at the central role that borrowing and rewriting has played in the very constitution of the idea of a literary tradition.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201L Ways of Reading: Forms of Difference

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

This course will focus on the politics of literary form--that is, how literary form and content work together to produce arguments about the social world. We will pay special attention to how 20th- and 21st-century writers use literary form to explore, illuminate, negotiate, and challenge categories of social difference, including race, gender, and sexuality. In addition to practicing techniques of close reading on a range of texts from different genres, we will also read literary criticism from a variety of theoretical and political perspectives--psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, historicist, etc.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201M Ways of Reading: Literature and/as Philosophy

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

This course will consider what lies at the intersection of literature and philosophy. We will read philosophies of literature-texts that consider the function, context, and fundamental characteristics of literary production-alongside literary texts that foreground key philosophical questions. We will consider the literary dimensions of philosophical writing alongside the philosophical dimensions of literary writing, toward a way of reading that destabilizes the notion of a fixed boundary between the two categories.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201N Ways of Reading: Adaptations: From Page to Stage

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

This course investigates dramatic adaptations that have originated from poetry, short stories, novels, and historical events. Through multiple modes of inquiry, we interrogate form, genre, narrative, aesthetic, and intended audience as well as the social, political, gender, sexuality, and/or racial context of each literary piece. Within these various "page to stage" adaptation processes, we track the evolution of our source texts and chart the longevity and changeable dynamics of elements, such as character, theme, plot, point of view, setting, and time, as they appear within each dramatic iteration.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201P Ways of Reading: Autobiography

"Ways of Reading" introduces students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major, and only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

"Ways of Reading" courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry, drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays; but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

This "Ways of Reading" course will explore autobiography as an elusive and multifaceted literary form. We will ask: Who or what is the subject of autobiography? Who besides the author is implicated in the acts of writing and reading autobiography? How elastic are the distinctions between fiction and fact, self-reportage and self-fabrication within autobiography? What kinds of narratives and artistic forms count as autobiographical? To pose these questions, we will explore hybrid texts that splice together varying genres and forms under the umbrella of autobiography, including poems, memoirs, graphic memoirs, personal essays, metafictional novels, documentary films, performance pieces, and biomythographies.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201Q Ways of Reading: The Pleasures of the Text

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

This course introduces the bundle of characteristics we think of as "literary" and the methods for studying them, with an eye toward pleasure: What spurs us to read, and what spurs us to return to certain texts? We will develop strategies for careful and close reading and techniques for the analysis of poetic and narrative forms; we will examine the idea of literature as a social institution and explore ways of making connections between textual details and the world beyond the text.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201R Ways of Reading: Strange Inheritance

Language precedes us. Nay, writing does. What do "we" do, then, with what we inherit? (For that matter, who is this "we"?) How do we think about what literary forms bequeath, force, and upend? About representations of democracy? About "the after-life of slavery" on the level of representation? This foray into the English major will teach you some theories and modes of reading rhetorical configurations of the self and the other, (in)hospitality, racialization, gendering, colonialism, history, and so on. Weaving together works of literature with literary and critical theory that meditate sometimes literally on each other, and always on the shared linguistic and colonial heritages, we will consider the ethics and politics of reading in (and against) a strange inheritance--one made strange (as it is made familiar) by the violent, imperial, colonial, enslaving forces at its inception(s). We will trace what is sometimes unwanted but must be reckoned with, and what is sometimes inextinguishably desired, across some of a matrix of these possible lineages: {Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea; Gayatri Spivak's Towards A Critique of Postcolonial Reason; and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy}; {select works of Négritude poetry (especially by Aimé Césaire); Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks; Shola von Reinhold's Lote; select works of Frank Wilderson III; and select works of David Marriott}; and/or {Homer, Derek Walcott, and Ocean Vuong}. We will read key works of structural linguistics, the New Criticism, and deconstruction, with emphasis on the thinking of Jacques Derrida regarding inheritance.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201S Ways of Reading: Imitation and the Real Thing

Are artworks imitations of "the real world," or are they "real things" in themselves? And what happens when one artwork imitates another? This Ways of Reading course explores the relationship between artistic representation and the reality it tries to capture, paying particular attention to what happens when literature engages with other kinds of art. We'll read variations of the Pygmalion myth--in which an artist falls in love with his creation and it comes to life--across a range of genres: poems, short fiction, novels, plays, and film. We'll also turn to various forms of literary critical inquiry, from close reading to psychoanalytic theory, and various kinds of historicism to ask how these depictions imagine the act of artistic creation and the kind of truth-claims that literature makes. Along the way, we'll think about the ways that these meditations on the mediated nature of literature--depictions of the relationship between the art objects and the world, the act of reflection, copying, or imitation--are used to imagine social difference, including questions of class, gender, race, and national identity. Throughout the course, we'll be paying attention to the ways that texts construct and convey meaning.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201T Ways of Reading: Literature About Literature

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading, and techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. So while students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn quickly that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, in popular culture, and in the discourses that shape everyday life.

This "Ways of Reading" course will ask: What is literature? We will read literature written by authors in their most playfully self-aware, self-interrogating moods: William Shakespeare raising questions about the nature and limits of imagination, Jane Austen dramatizing the perils of novel reading, and Adrienne Rich pondering female forms of making. We will engage recent theoretical debates about what literature is, but we will also read literature that does not share our 21st-century ideas, literature that works from different world views and strives for different effects. For instance, enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley embraced neoclassical forms of ordering--the weight of multiple historical traditions informing her sense of what poems are and do. Throughout, we will reckon with literary texts on their own terms but also with the ways they have been read at different moments in history. What is literature and what was it? How do we read it? What methods and theories have been ascendant at different moments? And why do we read it? What are its pleasures, problems, and possibilities? How did we end up with an English Department organized like this anyway?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL201V Ways of Reading: Imitation and the Real Thing

ENGL201Z Ways of Reading: Gifts, Debts and Obligations

Ways of Reading courses introduce students to the characteristics thought of as literary, and the methods for studying them. This is a gateway course into the English major. Only one of the ENGL201 series may be taken for credit.

Ways of Reading courses develop strategies for careful and close reading as well as techniques for the analysis of literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories. They familiarize students with some of the protocols of the literary-critical essay, examine the idea of literature as a social institution, and explore ways of connecting textual details and the world beyond the text. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature. While students will become adept literary critics, they also will learn that to be a literary critic is to read critically and carefully all the time: in poems, novels, and plays, but also in political speech, popular culture, and the discourses that shape everyday life.

This course will offer an introduction to the formal study of literature. Our discussion will be oriented by a consideration of poems, plays, and novels that address the bonds created among people by the exchange of gifts, promises, and debts. We will consider the way changing ideas about such bonds have been represented in literary texts and the way such ideas have affected our understanding of literature.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL202 Investigative Storytelling

This creative writing workshop is designed for students who aim to craft new narrative work through investigative or documentary research. Students might create a play, a screenplay, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, a digitally driven project, or something else. We will study some existing investigative artworks--dramatic pieces by Moises Kaufman, nonfiction by Leslie Jamison, poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, documentary film by the Maysles brothers, long-form journalism by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and podcasts by Brian Reed. We will cover interview techniques, research strategies, issues of rights and intellectual property use, and structure/dramaturgy as we plan, research, write, and workshop material together. Class members will regularly share work-in-progress and offer feedback to one another. By the end of the semester, students will be well acquainted with best practices for crafting investigation-based pieces and will have completed full or partial drafts of their projects, depending on project scope. Students are expected to have some workshop experience.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT203
Prereq: None

ENGL202Z Contemporary Short Stories in Translation

This course will introduce students to a wide range of contemporary short stories from around the world, translated into English. We will read fiction from four geographical clusters--Nordic Europe, Latin America, East Asia, Western Europe--as well as from outside these relatively well-defined categories. Along with exploring the fiction itself, we will consider how the English-language publishing industry treats these different zones, as we acknowledge the risk of ending up with national or regional stereotypes. We will also keep in mind the translator's role as an active creator of the works we are reading. In week two, we will pay special attention to the crucial professional role of the translator in getting these authors published and recognized, and there will be in-class visits from one translator in each cluster. The objective of the course is to get a basic overview of different contemporary trends and traditions, and their various paths to publication in English, as well as hopefully finding one or two new favorite writers.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT210Z, COL308Z
Prereq: None

ENGL203 American Literature to 1865

This lecture course charts a selective path through the English-language literatures of conflict in North America. Our optic will be double: one eye on history, the other on literary form, and we will experiment with ways of dialectically combining these two lines of vision. The scope of the course is wide, but we will proceed in the style of an anti-survey. Rather than unifying America through a gathering of textual parts, we will attempt to understand how literary forms supply an important index of historical evidence even as their pleasures and contradictions refuse the stabilities of the evidentiary. We will close the course with a late-20th-century speculative fiction that gives an alternative history of the continent after a successful anti-slavery revolution in 1859 (resulting in the formation of the socialist Black republic of Nova Africa), which will incite us to revisit the materials and the historical record we will have constituted during the semester.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST243
Prereq: None

ENGL203A American Literature on Fire: Conquest, Capitalism, Resistance: 1492-1865

We begin with a 1938 Langston Hughes poem, a north star shining light on American unexceptionalism and then move back in time: from Columbus's dismemberment and enslavement of the Arawaks when demanding gold; to Cabeza de Vaca's feel-good handbook for the conquest of indigenous peoples; to Puritan inventions of a "God" that pulls the trigger; to Franklin's blowing the whistle on a mercantile capitalism he supercharged with a secular work ethic; to a Declaration of "Independence" in 1776 that provoked alternative declarations written by workers, women, and formerly enslaved persons in the 19th century; to Poe's readings of a Divided States of America (race, gender, domesticity) as gothic; to Douglass's representations of the tactical artfulness and subversions of "slave" culture; to Hawthorne's deconstruction of the Americanization of power; to Thoreau's entwining of collective protest and what he hoped would be an individualized escape route; to Melville's attacks on imperialism, racism, and class domination; to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's critique of domestic slavery; to Stowe's socially transformative antislavery novel (whose sentimentalization recirculated stereotypes). Along the way, we will draw on Howard Zinn's classic A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES to help historicize the Americanization of inequality. During our literary-intellectual time travel, we will engage some of America's most "on fire" writers who make possible insights into the ideological foundations of American cultures, identities, and hegemonies that provocatively illuminate America's situation today (and offer some lessons for how to change it). And, not least of all, we will have critical fun throughout.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST243A
Prereq: None

ENGL204 American Literature, 1865-1945: The Americanization of Power

Together we'll explore not only the complexities of American literature from the 1860s to 1940s, but also how this literature is usable today and excels as critical equipment that can advance our understanding of the modern Americanization of power (put narrowly, we'll develop insights into a "democratic" capitalism, what some called a "Robber Baron" plutocracy, that pulled off and contrived to maintain systemic class, gender, and ethnoracial hierarchies to reproduce its power). As we unpack the relationship of literary form and social form, we'll trace connections between historical developments such as the gothic genre and gender ideologies, domestic romance and the social reproduction of labor, realism and mass-urbanism, naturalism and immigration, modernism and imperialism, and narrative experimentation and anti-racism. The creative works of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston will help teach us to be more imaginative readers of literature, ourselves, and what America was, is, and might be. While pooling ideas about this, we'll savor the pleasures of reading inspiring and transformative writing. This is very much a thinking-intensive course.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST235
Prereq: None

ENGL204A American Literature, 1865--1945

This course considers the way a large range of American writers responded to the industrial transformation of the United States. We will look at the way writers conceived and understood the rise of the corporation, the growth of the metropolis, the surge of migration, and the expansion of American power through war and settlement, and we will consider the way such visions related to the writers' understanding of the nature of American culture and the significance of literary expression. Among the authors discussed will be William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL205 Shakespeare

This lecture course is designed to introduce students to the often-demanding texts of Shakespeare's plays, their major genres (comedy, history, tragedy, and romance or tragicomedy), and the contexts in which they were produced. Shakespeare's career spanned a period of remarkable social, political, religious, and economic change, including the Protestant Reformation, the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, early colonialism, global trade, and the rise of the first purpose-built, commercial theaters. Innovations in dramatic form and genre, which Shakespeare helped craft, sought to make sense of these momentous shifts for a diverse public theater. The lectures assume no prior knowledge of Shakespeare or his times and are designed to illuminate the texts of the plays by examining their cultural contexts.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: THEA210
Prereq: None

ENGL206 British Literature in the Enlightenment: Individualism, Consumer Culture, and the Public Sphere

England was changing rapidly in the 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, it is often said that this period was crucial for the emergence of individualism, consumer culture, and the public sphere--for the modern world itself. The period is sometimes described as the Age of Reason, but it was also an age of bawdy laughter, intense emotion, brazen self-promotion, serious faith, and gossip in coffeehouses and magazines. It was an age, too, of flourishing marketplaces, imperial expansion, slavery and abolition. This course will track how literary writers celebrated, condemned, participated in, or simply tried to make sense of their changing moment (and the changing understandings of literature available in it).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: COL204
Prereq: None

ENGL207 Chaucer and His World

In this course, we will read Chaucer's fascinating dream-visions, The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS and THE HOUSE OF FAME and his best-known work, THE CANTERBURY TALES. We will also read selections from Chaucer's sources and consider how he adapts these texts in his own literary works. Some of the topics we will explore are the various genres of Chaucer's poetry (allegory, epic, romance, satire), medieval ideas about psychology and dreams, the ideology of chivalry, Chaucer's reinvention of the classical world, and views of gender and sexuality. All readings will be in Middle English, so we will read slowly and carefully, with attention to the language.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: MDST207
Prereq: None

ENGL208 Feminist Theories

How does "feminist" (a political commitment) modify "theory" (an intellectual practice)? We will address this question by reading a range of contemporary feminist theorists working to analyze the complex interrelations of social differences (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, and so on), and relations of social domination and economic exploitation in a globalized world. The question "what is to be done?" will oversee our work.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS209
Prereq: None

ENGL209 From Seduction to Civil War: The Early U.S. Novel

This course examines the relationship between nation and narrative: the collective fantasies that incited reading and writing into the 19th century. We will study the novel as a field of literary production both in dialogue with European models and expressive of changes in national culture, a form that both undermined and reinforced dominant ideologies of racial, gender, and class inequality during this turbulent period of national formation and imperial expansion. We will consider the ways the pleasure of novel-reading depends upon, even as it often disavows, the world outside the story. Throughout our reading, we will trace the ways these novels both reflect and participate in the historical development of the United States during a period that spans national founding, the consolidation of northern capitalism and an exacerbated North/South division, expansion into Mexico and the Pacific, and civil war. Through close attention to literary form, we will continually pose the question, What is the relationship between literary culture and historical change? We will examine who was writing, for whom they wrote, and the situation--political, commercial--in which the American novel was produced and consumed. We will begin with the novel of sentiment and seduction and conclude with reflections on slavery and racial revolution on the eve of the Civil War, all the time asking about the ways the novel might seduce us into either tolerating or resisting the way of the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST298
Prereq: None

ENGL210 The Rise of the Novel

The novel as we know it emerged in 18th-century England. The real questions are, how and why? Were novels first written by white men, expressing the attitudes and capitalizing on the reading practices of an emergent middle class? Or did they evolve from a somewhat less respectable tradition of romance writing by and for women? Did novelistic prose draw on scientific and economic discourses as it naively sought to present a realistic picture of the world? Or was the genre playfully self-aware, from its very origins, of the difficult relationship between reality and language? This course will explore some of the complexities of the rise of the novel, one of the most important and oft-told tales of literary history. As we read fictions full of criminals, love letters, scandals, and satirical self-referentiality, we will think about the differences between early novels and the not-quite novels that preceded them. We will focus on how novels work through plot, character, and realist prose, as we also explore the ideological work that the form does. We will ask, too, about the workings of scholarly narratives like "the rise of the novel": how do these critical narratives help us, as novel readers, understand our relationship to the past and to the novel as a form?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL211 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: Writing Science, Writing Science Studies

This Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing will give students practice writing about science, technology, and medical studies for general audiences. It will also function as a capstone experience for SISP majors: students will have a chance to reflect on the methodologies and theories they have learned during their time in the program, while also using those methodologies and theories to analyze issues and texts in our world today. Students will work collaboratively, editing each other's work, and significant class time will be spent workshopping student writing. The aim will be to produce publishable pieces of cultural analysis for the popular press.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: SISP213
Prereq: None

ENGL212 Victorian Fictions of Research

This course will investigate the relationship between literary production and new models of scientific evidence during the heyday of Britain's global power. We'll ask how novels grappled with new scientific paradigms and forms of evidence--the invention of anthropological fieldwork, the police archive, the geological and fossil record, the statistical average--and explore how those developments were reimagined through British fiction between 1830 and 1900. We'll focus on the theories of self and other that accompanied new scientific methods--the categories of primitive, deviant, minor, pathological, everyday--and the relation of this research to the construction of evidence, the scientific self, labor, and gender as social, historic, and economic processes. We will read fiction by Gaskell, Eliot, and Carroll, alongside social theory by foundational thinkers of the nineteenth century (Marx, Simmel, Martineau) and our own (Barthes, Said, Steedman). As a part of the course, we will also extend the conceptual questions raised by research to our own work, as we explore a range of scholarly tools and methods--from special collections archives to digital databases--in reflecting on the practices and infrastructures of research. The class will include trips to Wesleyan Special Collections.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL213 Literature and Black Feminism: The Dramas of Black Capital

This class explores Black women's fiction as a mode of critique and intervention into Black Americans' complicated relationships with social and economic capital in the wake of US chattel slavery. How do Black people negotiate the transition from being to owning property? How does the persistence of capital, even in the absence of the system of racial slavery that ushered it into being, continue to shape Black institutional access and Black intramural relations? How are white, Western regimes of value--constructed as they are through the production of racial-sexual difference in dominant habits of thought and representation--contested and, at times, recapitulated in Black social life? How does Black women's literature take up these questions, and what about Black women's literature uniquely equips it to meet this challenge? Ultimately, the course takes seriously Black women's literature as Black feminist thought, exploring how it indicts and imagines beyond the violence of modern racial capitalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS220, AFAM222
Prereq: None

ENGL214 Writing Nonfiction

In this creative course, students will address the elements of creative nonfiction, such as narrative, character, voice, tone, conflict, dialogue, process, and argument. The work of nonfiction writers such as James Agee, George Orwell, Joseph Mitchell, Walker Percy, Anne Lamott, Caroline Knapp, and Dave Eggers will serve as models and inspiration. The course will be taught in workshop fashion, with selected students presenting their writing in class each week.

Charles Barber is the author of two works of nonfiction and a novel in progress. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Medical School and a visiting writer at the College of Letters.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL201
Prereq: None

ENGL214Z Reading and Writing Memoir

In this intensive Winter Session class, we will read a variety of short and long works from the beloved, bewitching nonfiction genre of memoir, paying close attention to how the authors parse the past--and which parts they parse--to convert memories into lyrical works of literature that are at once personal and universal. We will also write our own examples of memoir, which will be the course's primary assignments. Students will have short writing exercises every day in class, so the course will offer a writing immersion experience.

Please note: Students should expect some readings and assignments to be due during winter break, prior to beginning Winter Session. Please visit the Winter Session website for the full syllabus: http://www.wesleyan.edu/wintersession.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL215 Place, Belonging, and Sound in the 20th c. Latina/o/x, Black, & Caribbean Imaginations--NYC

Throughout the latter 20th century, various aesthetic renderings of New York City have positioned it as a site of voyeuristic allure and racialized excess and pleasure--simultaneously posh, unfriendly, tourist-trapped, "seedy," "gritty," and segregated. Through select literary, cinematic, and performance optics of Latina/o/x, black, and Caribbean writers and artists, especially queer and bisexual writers and artists, this course will focus on memory, representation, form, sound, and the imagination in the layered and shifting site of mid-20th- to 21st-century New York City--and even more specifically, of Harlem, the Bronx, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Elizabeth, N.J. Fictionalizations, poetizations, and performances of first-person memories and reimaginings of overheard stories from older generations about life in the U.S. South and life in the Caribbean will feature in the works that we will study in this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST238, FGSS225
Prereq: None

ENGL216 Techniques of Poetry: Prosody and Poetic Form

By examining select Western and non-Western poetic forms, with the haiku and sonnet serving as formal anchors, students will study poems across the centuries and into the contemporary moment--and thus sharpen their aesthetic eyes and ears in preparation for drafting their own poems. Students will practice further as they read and provide feedback on each other's drafts in modified workshop sessions, wherein the poet, rather than the classroom, sits at the center. Students will exercise the forming of images, the uses of rhetoric by way of the volta, and develop an ear for the pentameter line. By the end of the semester, students will have developed a more sensitive attention to their writerly decisions; and will have a firm grasp on the occasions that might call for particular forms.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL216A Techniques of Poetry: Hidden Histories

Through a series of immersive reading and writing experiments, we will work toward uncovering and preserving histories that might otherwise be forgotten. In order to do this, we will study the documentary and investigative techniques poets have employed while attempting to write about hard-to-articulate events like grief, secrecy, unrecorded events, ecological disasters and environmental concerns, traumas, racism, gender politics, bright-but-fleeting moments of existence, and hauntings of all kinds. We will read and record accounts that cannot be told but must be told. We will work to uncover--and possibly heal--areas of historical numbness. We will explore poetry's relationship to preservation and the dynamic bonds between representation and reparation. And we will rewire history through history, making use of archival materials, public testimony, newspaper accounts, photographs, family documents, and more.

Guided by critical and creative investigations, in-class writing experiments, and extended projects, students will compose poems inspired by their own research. There will be presentations on the literature we read, as well as class discussions and workshops of one another's creative work. The class will culminate in a book arts project and a reflective essay.

Special attention will also be given to cultivating community and the benefits of sustaining an embodied artistic practice during extreme times and how doing so may benefit the health of the whole artist.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL217 Recent American Fiction

This course explores American fiction of the last fifteen years. We will discuss the particular demands that contemporary texts place on their readers while developing a map of the styles and preoccupations that mark our own moment of literary production.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL218 "The History that Hurts": Reading Saidiya Hartman

This course will introduce students to the major works of the black literary theorist and cultural historian Saidiya Valarie Hartman (b. June 25, 1961), who was named a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow in Literary History and Criticism and American History. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1984, Hartman earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1992; she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Students enrolled in this course will read and write about Hartman's trilogy of scholarly monographs: SCENES OF SUBJECTION: TERROR, SLAVERY, AND SELF-MAKING IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA (Oxford University Press, 1997); LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: INTIMATE HISTORIES OF RIOTOUS BLACK GIRLS, TROUBLESOME WOMEN, AND QUEER RADICALS (W. W. Norton, 2019). Finally, if her new book project is published before the syllabus is finalized, then students enrolled in this course will also read and write about Hartman's fourth scholarly monograph (tentatively titled "N Folio: An Essay on Narrative and the Archive").
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM219, AMST319, FGSS219
Prereq: None

ENGL219 Homer and the Epic

In this course we will read both the Iliad and the Odyssey (in English translation). These two great epics are recognized as the first major texts of the Western literary tradition, and they have had an incalculable influence on everything from literature, to history, to the visual arts. Through a close reading of both epics, we will consider issues such as Homeric composition and poetic practice, heroes and the heroic code, the relation between humans and gods, the role of fate, and the structure of Homeric society (e.g., the status of women; clan and community). We will also read a number of contemporary critical essays to help us frame our discussions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: CLST220
Prereq: None

ENGL219Z Homer and the Epic

IN-PERSON COURSE: 10:00am-noon and 1:00pm-3:00pm, Monday through Friday. Please note: Students should expect some readings and assignments to be due during winter break, prior to the beginning of Winter Session class meetings.

In this course we will read both the Iliad and the Odyssey (in English translation). These two great epics are recognized as the first major texts of the Western literary tradition, and they have had an incalculable influence on everything from literature, to history, to the visual arts. Through a close reading of both epics, we will consider issues such as Homeric composition and poetic practice, heroes and the heroic code, the relation between humans and gods, the role of fate, and the structure of Homeric society (e.g., the status of women; clan and community). We will also read a number of contemporary critical essays to help us frame our discussions.

Syllabi for Winter Session courses will be posted to https://www.wesleyan.edu/wintersession/courses.html as soon as they are available.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: CLST220Z
Prereq: None

ENGL220 Special Topics: Young Adult Novels in Verse and Other Poetic Intersections

In this generative workshop and discussion-based class, students will study story, arc, poetic dialogue, and the literary landscape of the booming Young Adult Novel world along with writing. This class will require both readership and a readiness to speak to the authors and poets of text including but not limited to: Me Moth, Poet X, Brown Girl Dreaming, When We Make It, and Long Way Down.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: WRCT208
Prereq: None

ENGL221 The African Novel I: Nervous Conditions

This class considers several canonical novels from sub-Saharan Africa. Our focus will be on their aesthetic and thematic properties; the novels are not meant as introductions to African histories, cultures, peoples, or practices. We will explore instead the specific subjects and styles of each work in the context of wider debates about orality, language, colonialism, gender, and the novel. To fathom the political and aesthetic stakes of African literary canon formation, we will also attempt to identify what makes a work canonical.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM221
Prereq: None

ENGL222 Poetics of Blackness

This course brings together Black critical theory and contemporary Black poetry in order to think through key sites of conflict in the theorization of Blackness. Rather than offer a literary history of Black poetry, this course is interested in approaching poetry as a crucial node of Black critical thought. Throughout this course we will pay particular attention to questions of form, genre, archive, queerness, gender, affect, visuality, ontology, and temporality as they approach and are undone by Blackness.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM220
Prereq: None

ENGL223 The African Novel II: After Achebe

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2003 novel, PURPLE HIBISCUS, summons Chinua Achebe, the "grandfather of African literature," in its opening line: "Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion." While Achebe is a formative influence on Adichie and on many other contemporary African writers, the central preoccupations of African literature have shifted considerably in recent years. This class will consider recent topics animating the field. These include debates about Afropolitanism, the role of publication houses and prize committees in the canonization and circulation of texts, queer African literature, African-language literature, and the position of African literature vis-à-vis world literature. Readings will be chosen from among the newest novels and short stories in publication.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM225
Prereq: None

ENGL224 Special Topics: Merging Forms

In this workshop for first- and second-year students, we will explore works that unsettle, cross, merge, hybridize, and otherwise play with genres--fiction, poetry, nonfiction--and with readers' expectations of such boundaries and conventions. We will look closely at how a range of writers both depend on and interrogate definitions of genre, while keeping in mind that such definitions are themselves historical constructs. Students will experiment with various forms in their own work, in shorter exercises, and in longer assignments.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL225 Transpacific Ecologies: Race, Literature, Environment

Although our climate emergency is undoubtedly planetary, the writer Amitav Ghosh has argued that the continent of Asia is in fact "conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming." This course explores how writers from both sides of the Pacific confront the Anthropocene and its related disasters of climate change, species extinction, deforestation, chemical pollution, and oceanic waste. Theoretical readings will address the challenges that the Anthropocene poses to literary representation, the literary innovations and strategies that have emerged in response to environmental crisis, and the question of what a specifically Asian/American (or transpacific) perspective on the environment introduces to ecocriticism. Fictional works will address specific ecological crises such as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and also attend to less punctual conundrums, including: recognizing nonhuman interests and assemblages; envisioning collective human agency; representing vast and complex planetary systems; coordinating human and geological histories; and assimilating scientific models and perspectives. In all cases, we will be particularly attuned to the question of how ecological problems impact literary form, asking which tools writers use to capture the new realities of today's climate emergency?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL226 Sublimity, Visions, and the Self in British Literature, 1789-1830

This course is an introduction to British literature from the 1790s to the 1820s. We will trace three central thematic and formal preoccupations through the poetry, fiction, and philosophical prose of the era: (1) sublimity and the Gothic; (2) the imagination, dreams, and visions; and (3) individualism and interiority.

No experience with philosophy, history, or British literature is expected; the course functions as an introduction to all of them and, in this sense, to the interdisciplinary study of literature.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL227 Reading The Victorians

Why read the Victorians? To know more about how an industrializing, urbanizing, commercial, and imperial nation imagines itself; to understand better how middle-class culture is established and comes to work all by itself; to explore the power of representations of sexual difference--the famous separate spheres for 19th-century men and women--and of the great divide that opens between the public and the private; to understand how sexuality extends the reach of disciplinary power, and how money, increasingly nothing but paper, extends value. Our primary focus will be on novels. We will study how large Victorian "triple-deckers" project intricately detailed worlds populated with compelling, three-dimensional characters. We will consider how novels represent the way we live now.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL228 Life Writing: Writing About the Self and from Experience

This course will examine both the power and the complexities of writing that derives from personal experience. Topics to be addressed, in turn, are memory (and its reliability); experience (authoritative/reportorial vs. interpretative/symbolic); identity and voice of the narrator; and agency (the degree to which the narrator is in control, or not in control, of the narrative). Types of life writing that will be explored are coming-of-age narratives, illness and trauma narratives, confessional narratives, autobiographical poetry and song lyrics, and interviews/oral histories. Readings and materials include Shadd Maruna, William Styron, Mary Karr, Donna Tartt, James Joyce, and many others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL227, WRCT227
Prereq: None

ENGL228Z Life Writing: Writing about the Self and from Experience

This course will examine both the power and the complexities of writing that derives from personal experience. Topics to be addressed, in turn, are memory (and its reliability); experience (authoritative/reportorial vs. interpretative/symbolic); identity and voice of the narrator; and agency (the degree to which the narrator is in control, or not in control, of the narrative). Types of life writing that will be explored are coming-of-age narratives, illness and trauma narratives, confessional narratives, autobiographical poetry and song lyrics, and interviews/oral histories. Readings and materials include William Styron, Mary Karr, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm X, Donna Tartt, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL227Z, WRCT227Z
Prereq: None

ENGL229 Afro-Surrealism

Amiri Baraka coined the term "Afro-Surreal" to describe the writer Henry Dumas's "skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one." In his 2009 "Afro-Surrealist Manifesto," D. Scot Miller builds on Baraka's observations and distinguishes Afro-Surrealism from Afrofuturism in the former's concern with the "RIGHT NOW." Indeed, in the "right now" of 2018, Afro-Surrealism seems to be having a moment, with the success of films like "Sorry to Bother You" and "Get Out," the musical and filmic work of Donald Glover/Childish Gambino, the visual art of Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, and the literature of Paul Beatty and Colson Whitehead, among others. This course will examine this contemporary resurgence of the Afro-Surreal, and trace its echoes in black popular music, in the work of African American literary figures like Dumas, Toni Morrison, Bob Kaufman, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, and through its African and Afrodiasporic foundations in the work of artists inspired by Léopold Senghor's Négritude movement. All of these artists "distort reality for emotional impact," as Miller puts it, and we will aim to connect these distortions of the "right now" to the material reality of life under regimes of anti-blackness and racial oppression that these Afro-Surreal works lays bare.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM226
Prereq: None

ENGL230 Introduction to Asian American Literature

This course introduces students to Asian American literature, culture, and literary criticism. In addition to exploring narratives concerning Asian American migration, exclusion, citizenship, and intersectionality, we will also focus on newer critical trajectories. These include Asian Americans and the U.S. and Global South, genealogies of violence, recent trends in Asian American and diasporic popular culture, climate change, and critical refugee studies. By examining a range of genres and critical methods, this course will advance understanding of how Asian America has shaped the making of American culture and history.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST264
Prereq: None

ENGL231 Foundations: Nation, South Asia, Diaspora

This course examines the relationships between the central narratives of South Asia and those of the global diaspora. What stories have been central to the idea of South Asian identity, experience of imperialism and colonialism, and nationhood? How have those stories been useful in navigating going to and living in global diasporic locations? Beginning with The Ramayana, our class will see its characters, plots, and messages adapted to diaspora, in such works as Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee, and Sita Sings the Blues. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses respond to fairy tales and even the Koran, as they circulate globally. India's much loved R.K. Narayan's The Guide serves to direct us to the worldwide phenomenon of Bollywood films, particularly those considering what it means to be South Asian in diaspora, such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge or Swadesh.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GSAS
Identical With: GSAS150
Prereq: None

ENGL232 Mystics and Militants: Medieval Women Writers

In this class we will read a wide range of works written by European women between ca. 1100--1400, including courtly, devotional, and polemical texts. The course will explore ideologies of gender in the Middle Ages and examine the ways in which our authors confronted the antifeminist discourses of their eras with learning and imagination. We will consider such topics as constructions of sexuality and the body, "courtly love," mystical religious experience, heresies, humanism, and utopian realms. In short, we will read works by women who created their own forms of authority and in doing so, both influenced and defied the authorities of their time.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: MDST238, FGSS224, RL&L231
Prereq: None

ENGL233 All Ah We: Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Drama & Performance

What are the dramatic utterances of Afro-Caribbean artists? How do Afro-Caribbean playwrights and other narrative-based performance artists present "Caribbean" and/or "West Indian" subjectivities in ways that are shared, yet critically different? In what ways are Afro-Caribbean dramas and performance pieces repositories for the practical, the theoretical, the sociological, the political, the imagined, and the lost? In answering these questions and more, we examine these textual and embodied expressions from the complicated crossroads of class, creolization, diaspora, ethnicity, folklore, gender, history, indentured servitude, isolation, language, race, religion, and slavery. At all times, this course revels in the polyphony that is Afro-Caribbean drama and performance.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM233, THEA233, CHUM233
Prereq: None

ENGL234 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies

The 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism signaled the presence of postcolonial studies, a field of intellectual inquiry that proved influential in the humanities and social sciences. How, from our vantage point in the latter end of the 20th century, do we understand both the age of imperialism/colonialism, and what happens afterwards? What are the conditions of decolonization and national independences? How do the cultures of the formerly colonized countries use and modify imperial vestiges, and invent themselves anew? Central to our course will be the work of three major theorists in the field of postcolonial studies: Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. Among other important ideas, we will discuss Orientalism, subalternity, and mimicry.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GSAS
Identical With: GSAS233, AFAM236
Prereq: None

ENGL235 Childhood in America

Probably the first literature we fall in love with, children's literature shapes individuals and cultures in profound ways, investing us with important mythologies and guiding our identities and behaviors. This course will examine fairy tales, some works from the "golden age" of children's stories, and some contemporary works. We will enrich our reading of the fiction with some of the central theorists of this genre, including Bruno Bettelheim, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-EDST, SBS-EDST
Identical With: EDST241, AMST241
Prereq: None

ENGL236 British Modernist Fiction

This course will introduce students to British novels from the modernist period of 1900-1945, a time of massive formal innovation. We will explore the formal, thematic, and philosophical features of British modernist fiction through close readings of novels and through occasional readings in essays of the period and more recent criticism. This course will provide a broad, if necessarily selective, picture of modernist fiction in all its considerable variety. In addition to some iconic examples of high modernism, we will read some arguably minor novels as well. Much of our attention will be on modernism's recurrent concern with the meaning of modernity itself. Are modernism and modernity identical, antagonistic, or mutually dependent? How is modernism implicated in Britain's waning imperial fortunes? Is modernism avant-garde or canonical, elitist or engaged with popular culture?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL237 The Whole Wide World: Poets in Translation

This course is a craft seminar examining English-language translations of some of the world's most influential poets, done always with an eye toward "stealing" techniques that may enhance our own work. Some of the poets under consideration include Pablo Neruda, Ana Akhmatova, Nazim Hikmet, Czeslaw Milosz, and Adelia Prado.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL238 Russian and American Poetic Encounters

The fascination of Russian poets with American authors, and the curiosity of Anglophone poets about the culture of Russia and the USSR, are trends that accompany the turbulent twentieth century, when the political relationships between Russia and the USA were largely inimical. But it was also a period when poetry mattered. In this course, we will focus on some of the most significant poets of the twentieth century.

We will study six Russian poets (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Olga Sedakova, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko), and six American poets (William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian), and also one Caribbean poet (Derek Walcott).

We will learn how to analyze lyric poetry, and how to study it comparatively. We will explore the poets' dialogues with each other across cultures. For example, we will learn how Mayakovsky's "ladder" might have influenced Williams' vers libre, or how Joseph Brodsky learned T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality in poetry even though Eliot was banned in the USSR. We will also explore where poetry and politics meet. For example, we will discuss why Langston Hughes found his visit to the USSR inspirational as an African-American poet, and we will see whether the myth that Robert Frost's visit to the USSR contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis is true.

The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES222, RULE222, RUSS222, WLIT267
Prereq: None

ENGL238Z Jane Austen and Her World

In this course we will explore Jane Austen's unique approach to the realist novel and her distinctive engagement in contemporaneous debates about art, personhood, and politics. Austen was a sharp, subtle, and principled writer who tended to explore competing arguments and assumptions rather than render explicit judgments. She weighed in on aesthetic controversies involving beauty and the picturesque, the appropriate language for literature, the ethics of readers' identification with characters, and the truth claims inherent in realism. She considered philosophical questions about how individuals come to know the world and themselves, and the value and danger of a complex inner life of emotion and imagination. She examined the competing claims her contemporaries made for the primacy of the individual, the family, and the community, and for local rootedness and cosmopolitan independence. Our course reading will consist of three novels by Austen as well as works of painting, literature, and nonfiction prose. Students will complete frequent exercises designed to open up new ways of encountering and investigating a literary text. Curiosity and a willingness to experiment are the only prerequisites.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL239 Anticolonial/Decolonial: Literature and Film

This course examines how histories of twentieth century anti-imperialist writing and cinema are relevant for contemporary decolonizing agendas. We will compare works by colonial and postcolonial theorists, writers and filmmakers, to examine how literature and film address processes of colonization, anti-imperialist struggle, decolonization, and neo-colonization. Readings will be drawn from a range of countries in both the Global North and South and films include Ousmane Sembène's La Noire de.../Black Girl (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966), Sarah Maldoror's Léon G. Damas (1994), Stephanie Black's Life & Debt (2001), and Ciro Guerra's Waiting for the Barbarians (2019).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: WLIT208
Prereq: None

ENGL240 Introduction to African American Literature

This course will introduce students to African American literature. It will be divided into two parts. The first will pay particular attention to the experience of enslavement by focusing on several unique primary and secondary textual couplings, including (but not limited to): Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845) and Saidiya Hartman's "Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America" (1997); and Harriet Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (1861) together with Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987). In addition to these classic 19th-century slave narratives and contemporary sources, then, the first part will also include supplementary readings by Kenneth Warren, David Blight, Angela Davis, Alexander Weheliye, Spillers, Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, Jennifer Morgan, and Frank Wilderson. The second part will focus on 20th- and 21st-century African American literature and literary criticism. It will bring together a wide range of readings from across genres and disciplines, attempting to sketch out the major aesthetic and political features of the black literary project. Authors here will include W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Michael Rudolph West, Hazel Carby, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Alain Locke, Shane Vogel, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Asia Leeds, Roderick Ferguson, Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Teju Cole, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, Claudia Rankine, Warren, and Fred Moten.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM202, AMST275
Prereq: None

ENGL241 Reading Toni Morrison: Blackness and the Literary Imagination

This course will introduce students to the major works of the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019). In addition to the trilogy--"Beloved" (1987), "Jazz" (1992), and "Paradise" (1997)--and "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" (1992; originally delivered as the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 1990), readings may also include the following novels (in chronological order): "The Bluest Eye" (1970); "Sula" (1973); "Song of Solomon" (1977); "Tar Baby" (1981); "Love" (2003); "A Mercy" (2008); "Home" (2012); and "God Help the Child" (2015).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM229
Prereq: None

ENGL242 Longform Narrative

This course will explore techniques and theories that sustain multifaceted and long narratives in fiction and nonfiction. Students will read texts that transpire over many pages, over long periods of time, and which involve deep explorations of character, setting, and theme. Readings will draw on various genres: classics ("Crime and Punishment" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"), crime fiction (Donna Tartt's "The Secret History"), and narrative nonfiction (Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" and Gay Talese's "Honor Thy Father"). We will examine and explore the elements that sustain long and complex stories. Students will write one very long (50-page) essay or piece of fiction over the course of the semester.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL230
Prereq: None

ENGL243 Caribbean Writers in the U.S. Diaspora

The Caribbean cloaks a complex history in a Club Med exterior. While white sands and palm trees proclaim it the "antidote to civilization," Caribbean writers undertake to represent a fuller picture of the individual in a world shaped by colonialism, slavery, nationalism, and cultural striving. This course will examine selected literary texts as part of an ongoing dialogue among the region's history, mythology, and aesthetics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: GSAS247, AFAM243, LAST247, AMST247
Prereq: None

ENGL244 Kill Anything That Moves: The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

This course examines various forms of literature and film to understand the legacies of one of the most transformative events in American culture and history: the Vietnam War. "Kill anything that moves" was the order that American soldiers reportedly received while on the ground in Vietnam, yet, to a large extent, the historical focus on the American experience of the conflict has overshadowed other perspectives. Thus, this class will take a comparative approach, exploring works by canonical and noncanonical American, Southeast Asian, and Southeast Asian American authors and directors. Among the diverse genres we will study are prose, poetry, graphic narrative, and narrative and documentary film. To think about the Vietnam War's broader relevance, we will situate the works under study within current debates concerning refugees, genocide, human rights, and the complex politics and aesthetics of war representation. Students will have the opportunity to investigate an under-studied aspect of the Vietnam War toward the end of the semester.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST295
Prereq: None

ENGL245 Introduction to Literary Theory: Suspicion, Ideology, Deconstruction

There are ways of reading concerned with fixing, policing, and reifying assumed meanings, as well as the violent, normative structures that ground them, and there are ways of reading to the limits of what is (un)certain yet articulatable--reading that renders visible so as to destabilize antiblack, colonial, sometimes literalist and other times deceptively metaphorical constraints on language and invention. This course is devoted to the latter, as it is to disturbing normativity's self-entrenched truths, for normativity's colonial and imperial impunity and sedimentation are not the same things as eternal. While some approaches to language, and the ideologies they shroud and animate, might promise the seeming comforts of sudden breaks with history and complicity, or safekeep status quo notions of prophetic fulfillments of history as it was allegedly supposed to be, the texts of this course are less pious, and move more slowly, suspiciously, and "weirdly" with the linguistic structures of being and time. The reading modes featured in the course (i.e., deconstruction, black critical theory, Afro-Caribbean negative thought, speculative theories, and mysticism) would compel ideologically gnarly forces to tremble--exposing their violence and suspending any swift retrenchment to the very mechanisms that made such possible. And they ask us: what transformations might be necessary to not restore power to the very juggernauts we, as readers, have worked to possibly make tremble? In other words, how do we read literature and theory to learn how to read any use of language for ideology and not only locate, say, representations of sovereign violence in such, but even--dare we think it?--initiate depositions of power, and invent?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL246 Personalizing History

How much are we shaped by our historical times and places? How much power do we have to make our historical conditions respond to our needs and desires? These questions and others are at the foundation of this course, which includes both memoir writing and memoir reading. We will construct narratives about our times and selves in a series of writing workshops. There will be some exercises where you will be asked to research specific aspects of your times and places. For example, you might be asked to research and write about such questions as when and where were you born, what were the major cultural or political currents of that time, and how was your early childhood influenced by them? Or you may be asked to bring in a photograph of someone important in your personal history and write about that person.

The memoir is a distinct genre, with topics/themes particular to it. Some of the most important are memory itself, childhood, place and displacement, language, loss/trauma/melancholia/nostalgia, self-invention or transformation, family, and generational differences. The class will engage with these topics in the analysis of the readings and also in the writing of memoirs. Specific techniques will be highlighted for writing practice: the catalog, diction, dialogue, metaphor, description, point of view, and narrative structure, including temporal organization, the doubled narrative, and the narrative frame.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST245
Prereq: None

ENGL247 Imperial Education: Colonial Template

Where, how, and for what reasons did our modern structures of education originate? Beginning with the sketching out of an educational model in the British Raj, we will examine the dissemination of that model globally, in the British and French colonies of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and among immigrants and the proletariat. How and where does that model change, and to what effect? History will provide the context for our major subject matter: literature focussing on the educational experience. Among our historical and theoretical readings will be Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education, Viswanathan's The Beginnings of English literary study in British India, Wa Thiong'o's Decolonizing the Mind, Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and José Marti's On Education. We will also analyze literary texts and films, including Narayan's The English Teacher, Beti's Mission to Kala, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, the film Sugar Cane Alley, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-EDST
Identical With: EDST237, GSAS237, AFAM238
Prereq: None

ENGL248 Shakespearean Revolutions

Shakespeare's works emerged during a period of revolutionary social, political, religious, economic, and cultural change, including the Protestant Reformation, the rise of print culture, the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, early colonialism, global trade, and the emergence of the first, purpose-built, commercial playhouses. Innovations in dramatic form and genre, which Shakespeare helped craft, sought in varying ways to make sense of these momentous shifts for diverse theater publics. Revivals and adaptations of his works on stage and screen during times of revolutionary change have rendered the Shakespearean canon a site of subsequent social and cultural contestation. This class considers the "revolutionary" dimension of four Shakespeare plays both in their own time and place, and in later theatrical and filmic productions and adaptations. We will trace first-, second-, and third-wave feminist reimaginings of "The Taming of the Shrew"; Second World War- and Vietnam War-era renderings of "Henry V"; civil rights and anti-apartheid era restagings of "Othello"; and attempts to decolonize "The Tempest."
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: CHUM248
Prereq: None

ENGL249 Data and Culture

What does the mass digitization of the print cultural record mean for the making and study of literature, art, and culture? This course introduces students to the critical and cultural study of data by introducing key debates around the meaning of data in the humanities. Like "slow food"--a movement where diners, farmers, and chefs rethink what and how we produce and consume--we will explore data as local, embedded, and requiring careful critical reflection. How can computational tools help us to understand art and literature? What do digital archives reveal (or obscure) about the people who make them? What kinds of writing have, historically, been seen as "uncreative" or automatable and what might this reveal about ideas of labor, gender, race, class, and computation? We will explore the foundations of this field while also discussing concerns that emerge when accessing and maintaining digital cultural artifacts in time and across global and local contexts. Weekly readings will introduce concepts for understanding the cultures (and cultural artifacts) that produce and are produced by data and key techniques that humanities researchers use to organize, mediate, and analyze digital sources. This course will draw on a range of critical traditions, including history of the book, media studies, science & technology studies, computational literary studies, and critical data studies. Students will explore these methods through reflection papers, short code assignments, exercises in data curation and critique, and final projects. Course meetings will alternate between discussions and workshops with data from local libraries and special collections, including Olin Library Special Collections & Archives.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL250 Technologies of the Self

Where does the idea of an authentic self come from? The desire to represent the authentic self informs the narrative genres of the confession and memoir and visual ones of the selfie and self-portrait alike. Yet both the memoir and the selfie "self" are mediated, first, via the technologies of print and screen, and second, via the conventions of particular genres that make these legible as a memoir and selfie, as opposed to, for example, an interview or a portrait. In this course, we will examine how different technologies not only represent but produce the self. These technologies include "writing" technologies: print and digital; genre and medium (autobiography, the slave narrative, memoir, self-portraits, and selfies); and technologies of the state, which produce citizens, subjects, and humans.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM237, AMST223
Prereq: None

ENGL252 Animal Theories/Human Fictions

The question of "the animal" has become a recent focus of theory, although depictions of nonhuman animals can be traced to the very origins of representation. This course will move among literature, philosophy, art, and theory in an effort to trace the changing conceptions of human-animal difference and human-animal relations from 18th-century fictions of savage men and wild children to current theories of the posthuman. We will consider the ways that the representation of "the animal" intersects with theories of gender and race as it also contests the grounds of representation itself. Authors may include Rousseau, Poe, Sewell, Mann, Colette, Coetzee, Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, and Harway.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL238, FGSS239
Prereq: None

ENGL253 Science and/as Literature in Early Modern England

Seventeenth- and 18th-century Britain saw the development and popularization of the "new science." Microscopes, telescopes, air pumps, automata, and experiments captured the popular imagination. The first important scientific societies and journals were founded, and the public learned about new discoveries through sermons and coffeehouse lectures. British science was brought to its colonies across the globe, and it was shaped, in turn, by the different natural products and the brutal realities of slavery there. This course will trace the literary reaction to these cultural changes. A woman natural philosopher wrote utopian science fiction, and satirists skewered mathematicians and experimenters. While the best of early 18th-century nature poetry takes Newton quite seriously as it depicts the way light glimmers off objects, by the century's end William Blake villainized Newtonian thought as reductive and deadening. We will try to understand what writers found exhilarating, scary, confusing, hilarious, or important about science at this key moment of its development. At the same time, we will read this science as literature--considering, say, Francis Bacon's symbolically fraught "idols" and Robert Boyle's "literary technology," the role of poetry in spreading scientific ideas and the importance of analogy and metaphor to the very logics that structured scientific thought. The disciplines of science and literature were not as cleanly separated in this period as they are now, and we can better understand both by exploring their intersections.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: STS253
Prereq: None

ENGL254 India: Identity, Globalization, and Empire

In this course, we will read literature and watch films that shed light on how various socio-economic and political trends have impacted India and its inhabitants during the 20th and 21st centuries. We will begin our study in the early 2000s, when the country made international headlines for being a "globalization" success story and a new global superpower, and then move backwards in time to the post-colonial and colonial eras. We will discuss various questions: What exactly is globalization, and is it something new and inevitable? How is it related to empire, and how do entities like globalization and empire impact the evolution of both individuals and communities? We will watch Bollywood and Hollywood films and closely examine the literature of Partition. We will discuss the undying presence of communal violence in modern India, and the rise of the Hindu Right. We will read English-language texts, and also texts translated from Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Bengali.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: GSAS254
Prereq: None

ENGL255 The Comic Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century

This course examines the tradition of the comic novel from the origins of the novel itself to the early twentieth century. We will begin by examining the two models for the comic novel that emerged at the beginning of our period, Fielding's TOM JONES and Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: a narrator who is colloquial and digressive or reclusive and ironic; a plot that is episodic and fragmentary or unified and spare; an ethical scheme that relies on satire and social commentary or on poetic justice and the implications of theme. We will then trace the ways later writers drew on and rebelled against those two modes. While enjoying these very funny books on their own terms, we will also take seriously their experiments with narrative form; their complicated relationship to the categories of "the novel," comedy, realism, and modernism; and their engagement with the social, economic, and political tensions of the world they depict, however hilariously.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL255Z Writing the Body

How does the body write? Do we trace our words with fingers and toes, with a pen and paper, with flour or glitter or dust or the soles of our feet? Can the written word remind us that we are more than our eyes or our heads? Writing the body is an attempt to link the worlds of the written and the somatic through the act of writing. This class is both a generative creative writing course and a theoretical exploration of the ways in which the body has been rendered in literature, poetry, and philosophy. Putting queer studies, disability studies, Black studies, and Indigenous studies into conversation with prose, plays, and poetry, students will explore different strategies of embodied writing. Looking to the work of Maggie Nelson, Jean-Luc Nancy, Eileen Myles, Christina Sharpe, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Hortense Spillers, Eve Tuck, Billy Ray Belcourt, Torrey Peters, Wendy Ortiz, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jordy Rosenberg, Gabrielle Civil, Ursula Le Guin, adrienne maree brown, and Frank O'Hara students will produce a written work that moves promiscuously between theory and creative nonfiction.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA236Z, FGSS233Z
Prereq: None

ENGL256 Comedy and the Comic Spirit in the Long 19th Century

This course follows the Comic Spirit (as novelist George Meredith called it) as it frolics through 19th-century literature and popular culture. We will examine how writers experimented with traditional elements of comedy such as courtship plots, playful language, and eccentric characters as well as with universal aspects of storytelling such as the narrator's voice and the ethical implications of poetic justice. While enjoying these hilarious works on their own terms, we will also take seriously their experiments with narrative form; their complex relationship to the categories of the novel, comedy, and realism; and the ways humor created links between literature and the visual and musical arts. This course fulfills the English Department's Literary History II and British Literature requirements.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL257 Introduction to Detective Fiction

This seminar introduces two intertwined genres: detective fiction and crime fiction. Surveying a range of British, American, as well as postcolonial writers from Kenya and India, we'll explore how novelists and short story writers imagined the operations (and failures) of law, justice, and truth in different historical moments, and towards different ends. We'll learn some techniques for analyzing detective fiction--from its form, to its format in early periodicals, to its social and historical and political subtexts. We will pay particular attention to the ways of knowing the genre enables--from the early colonial detective fictions and constructions of race to the later-day crime fiction that uses the genre to stage problems of adjudicating and redressing imperial harms. Along the way, we'll use these at-times pulpy mysteries to think through the status of genre fiction in the university canon and the relationship of art, entertainment, and commodity.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL258 New World Poetics

God and money, love and beauty, slavery and freedom, war and death, nation and empire: The themes of early American poetry will carry us from London coffeehouses to Quaker meetinghouses, from Philadelphia drawing rooms to Caribbean plantation fields. Our texts will range from pristine salon couplets to mud-bespattered street ballads, from sweetest love poems to bitterest satire. Digging deeply into the English-language poetry written, read, and circulated after the first English settlement in North America, we will trace the sometimes secret connections between history and poetic form, and we will listen to what these links can tell us about poetry and politics, life and literature in our own time. Our poets ignored false divisions between art and society, and so will we.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST269
Prereq: None

ENGL259 The Art of the Personal Essay

The personal essay is short-form, first-person, narrative nonfiction that encompasses many genres: memoir, reflection, humor, familial and social history, and cultural criticism. Yet even these boundaries often blur within a single essay, and the personal essay can expand to include almost any topic. Writing personal essays--what author and critic Philip Lopate calls "the self-interrogative genre"--helps us find out what we think, often makes us change our minds, and, ideally, leads us to new insights. In class, we will discuss the assigned readings, participate in group responses to each others' writing (workshops), and write in response to prompts. We will study both traditional and unconventional techniques of nonfiction, focusing on the elements of craft: structure, voice, clarity, the use of descriptive detail, and revision.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: WRCT228
Prereq: None

ENGL259Z The Art of the Personal Essay

We all have stories to tell. But there is hard work in the act of transforming our intimate experiences into meaningful and captivating stories. This course dives into this labor by focusing on the craft of essay writing. Quite specifically, students will practice a variety of creative nonfiction writing techniques as a means of critically reflecting and analyzing personal experiences in order to produce essays that speak to readers in and outside of our immediate communities and contexts. Course assignments will include a writer's journal, workshop letters to classmates, three short personal essays, and a final essay whose subject and style is decided by the writer. Readings will include essays published in the past 30 years by authors such as (but not limited to) Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, Jose Antonio Vargas, Zadie Smith, and Karla Villavicencio.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: WRCT228Z
Prereq: None

ENGL260 The Word for World is Information: Ideologies of Language in Science Fiction & Film

By the middle of the 20th century, it had begun to seem possible to produce a grand theory of communication that would use language as a basis for understanding all of human thought, behavior, and culture. As competing versions of such a theory circulated through academic disciplines as disparate as anthropology, neurophysiology, and the emerging field of computer science, they also filtered out--sometimes in strangely warped or oversimplified forms--into popular culture.

This course will examine the most interesting and influential of these theories, both in their scholarly origins and in their most puzzling and promising elaborations in works of literary and filmic science fiction. We will be particularly attentive to the ways that the narrative logic of science fiction texts can gloss over certain logical and philosophical inconsistencies in these theories while revealing others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL258
Prereq: None

ENGL261 "Before the 'Body' there is the 'Flesh'": Reading Hortense Spillers

This course will introduce students to the major works of the black feminist theorist and literary critic Hortense J. Spillers (b. April 24, 1942), one of the greatest essayists and most gifted intellectuals of our times. While her published writings are legion, Spillers is perhaps best known for her scholarly article titled "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (originally published by Diacritics in 1987). In addition to "Mama's Baby," then, together we will read and engage at close range with the essays collected in "Black, White, and in Color" (published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003) in order to reveal the extraordinary complexity and clarity of her thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM264, FGSS262
Prereq: None

ENGL262 Beyond the Talking Book: Reading African American Literature in the Newspapers

The majority of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century African American writers, such as Frances Harper, Martin Delany, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Cyril Briggs, published their work in African American periodicals. In this course, we will examine the works of these canonical authors (as well as some lesser known ones) in their original publication context, the magazine archives of The Christian Recorder; The Anglo-African Magazine; The Colored American Magazine; The Crisis; The Crusader; Opportunity; and Fire!! The guiding question in our readings is this: how does our understanding of these canonical texts change when we read them in their original context--as either serial novels, or as components of a larger composite magazine, consisting of multiple different texts and images? In addition to honing students' literary close-readings skills, this course aims to teach students how to do original research and critically engage with multi-genre, mixed forms like the magazine.

Authors we will read include: Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois. In order to get a better understanding of the literary conventions of the serial form, students will read one of the assigned serialized novels (Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood) in its original installment-format, week-by-week. Reading these works serially will also enable them to play closer attention to each installment's relationship to its surrounding texts and images.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM261, AMST262
Prereq: None

ENGL263 Black Performance Theory

What does it mean to perform identity, to perform race, to perform blackness? How is blackness defined as both a radical aesthetic and an identity? In this course, we will focus on theater and performance as a resource for thinking about black history, identity, and radical politics in excess of the written word. Following recent work in Black Studies and Performance Studies, this class will pay particular attention to the doing of blackness, the visible, sonic, and haptic performances that give over to a radical way of seeing, feeling, and being in an anti-black world. Plays, films, and texts might include works by Fred Moten, Alexander Weheilye, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Suzan Lori-Parks, Danai Gurira, Shane Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Dee Rees, Celiné Sciamma, Saidiya Hartman, Huey P. Copeland, Darby English, Lorraine Hansberry, Hilton Als, Spike Lee, Isaac Julien, Martine Syms, Tavia Nyong'o, and Daphne Brooks.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA266, AFAM266, FGSS276
Prereq: None

ENGL264 Outsiders in European Literature

Modern literature is replete with protagonists who represent a position or identity that is outside an accepted mainstream; they are different, peculiar and/or attractive, and potentially dangerous. This course will focus on the experience of being or being made into such an outsider, or other, and on the moral, cultural, racial, gendered, sexual, or national norms or boundaries such an outsider establishes for the inside. Reading both fiction and theory, we will ask how the terms of inside and outside are culturally and historically constructed as we also look for proposals for dealing with outsiders and their otherness. Authors may include Kafka, Mann, Camus, Colette, Fanon, Sartre, Beauvoir, Duras.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL274
Prereq: None

ENGL265 Special Topic: The Power of Mystery: Writing Crime and Noir Fiction

Crime fiction, in its many incarnations, is perhaps the most popular and widely-read genre in the world. In this class, we'll examine why mystery is such an effective tool for engaging readers and how we can use it to create our own powerful fiction, be it detective, cozy, clue-puzzle, or noir fiction. We will read and discuss several stories and short novels that serve as examples of the form. We'll also explore the elements and expectations of the different sub-genres through writing exercises and short assignments that will culminate in the final project, a novelette that centers on a mystery.

Please note that this course does not fulfill the 300-level course or upper-level workshop.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL296

ENGL266 Body and Text

In this class, students will study authors who are considering their own identities and those of their writings, working through and working out affinities. Readings will generate larger discussions about language, art, genre, (body) politics, and aesthetics. Students will also write texts of various types--stories, notebooks, essays, fictions, and/or poetry.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL267 Pessimism, Nihilism, and Black Literature

This course considers Black literature's interventions into philosophical discourses of pessimism and nihilism. In contrast to the pathologization and dismissal with which they are often met, we will take both seriously as schools of thought. How are pessimism and nihilism distinct from each other? What do they offer as interpretative lenses for and approaches to Black art and Black existence? How are they reflected in literary form? We will closely consider these, and related, questions, looking to the work of authors such as Percival Everett, Jesmyn Ward, Dambudzo Marechera, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Gayl Jones.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM269
Prereq: None

ENGL268 Spiritual Autobiography: Building Communities Through Interfaith Literacy

This course will invite students to learn about the art of spiritual autobiography (SAB) and consider the impact of one's spiritual, religious, and cultural identities and beliefs, and how they are influenced by, and influence, their context, communities, and experiences. This course carefully blends intellectual curiosity and learning with self-reflection, self-integration, and civic engagement.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RELI
Identical With: CSPL207, RELI207
Prereq: None

ENGL268Z Solitude, Society and Loneliness in Romanticism and Modern Culture

We are now living in an age of constant connection to anybody, anywhere, at any time. An indirect result of this is that individual privacy and solitude are being sacrificed (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) for the pleasures as well as the risks of interconnection. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has, however, highlighted the risks of extended solitude, which has made reconnection a newly relevant theme in our lives. We thus find ourselves at a moment in history when we think of both solitude and connection with deep feelings of ambivalence. How can literature, sociology, art, and film about solitude and connection help us to think clearly and deeply about their roles in our lives?

We will read and discuss authors who consider the risks and pleasures both of solitude and interconnection, from early Romantic writers such as Mary Shelley, to American Romantics such as Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, to modern European writers such as Franz Kafka and Dino Buzzati. We will also examine non-fiction works such as Sherry Turkle's Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. We will use these works ultimately to consider our own culture of interconnectivity. What place and meaning do the solitude and privacy so prominent in Romantic literature have in a modern culture that makes them virtually obsolete? What can films such as Kieslowki's A Short Film about Love and Hitchcock's Rear Window show us about the relationship of solitude and privacy? More generally, what can these books and films tell us about solitude and interconnection in and since the nineteenth century?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL288Z
Prereq: None

ENGL269 Introduction to Playwriting

This course provides an introduction to the art and craft of writing for theater. In the course of the semester, students will create plot and characters, as well as compose, organize, and revise a one-act play for the final stage reading. The course will help students develop an artistic voice by completing additional playwriting exercises, as well as reading and discussing classic and contemporary plays. The instructor and students' peers will provide oral and written feedback in workshop sessions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA199
Prereq: None

ENGL270 Writing Creative Nonfiction

Practice in writing literary and journalistic nonfiction--for example a profile, narrative, review, commentary, travel essay, family sketch, or personal essay. Students are also welcome to try science writing, arts or music reviewing, and other specialized writing designed to engage general readers. Readings include work by Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, William Finnegan, George Orwell, Brian Doyle, Andre Aciman, and many others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL271 Distinguished Writers/New Voices

Students will read a range of nonfiction and fiction as well as works by writers visiting Wesleyan for our reading series. The class will survey past and contemporary American authors who have successfully captured the artistic, social, and political stakes of the world they inhabit. We will juxtapose literary generations ("distinguished writers" and "new voices"), examine their legacies and ruptures, and explore topics such as the voice, positionality, identity, gender, and the archive. Readings include pieces by well-known writers ranging from Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, George Orwell, Joan Didion, Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, Teju Cole, Anne Boyer, Valeria Luiselli, Robin Wall Kimmerer. On several Wednesdays throughout the semester, critically acclaimed and award-winning authors will be reading on campus. You are required to attend and respond to these readings. We will prepare for these authors' visits by reading selections of their work.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL272 Modernist City-Texts

Since the 19th century, the city has been both a privileged and a problematic object of representation for narrative realism: privileged because urban spaces have increasingly been seen as shaping or producing the very social relations and individual experiences that realism wants to describe; problematic because the city itself, as a coherent totality that might explain those relations and experiences, is too vast, heterogeneous, and complex to be represented through the traditional techniques of realism.

This course will approach the problems and possibilities of the city for realism through a close reading of two large, ambitious texts that attempt to represent the city as a totality: James Joyce's novel ULYSSES (1922) and David Simon's television series THE WIRE (2002-2008). We will be particularly concerned with two techniques, pioneered by Joyce, for representing the city: stream of consciousness, which creates a tour of the city from the perspective of a single, mobile flâneur; and montage, which creates a map of the city by juxtaposing various cross-sections of social life or various institutions central to the city's functioning.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL270
Prereq: None

ENGL273 Translation in Theory and Practice

This seminar is a workshop devoted to helping students from a range of disciplines and departments hone their practices of translation. Translation is part of a wide range of academic, publishing, and creative activities: humanities and social science scholars read texts in translation, translate while doing field work and archival research, and include translations in their articles and books; translation is an engine of creativity for many writers, bilingual or not. This course will begin by looking at various alternate translations of the same texts, to expand our sense of options and possibilities. The next five weeks of reading will introduce students to some of the main debates, theories, and practices of translation into English.

The second half of the course will focus on students' own translation projects. While you are welcome to pursue a project you already have in mind, most students will be choosing and starting a new project, guided by the discussions and topics in the first half of the course. The scope can be small (a single short story, a chapter of a novel or biography, a few poems or song lyrics), or you can have an eye to a bigger project you want to pursue after the end of the semester (a senior thesis, a short-story submission for publication, a book pitch). Week by week, all students will respond in class and in writing to translations-in-progress. In the last week, we will get to see and respond to everyone's revisions.

Facility in a language other than English is required; perfect fluency is not required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT210, COL308
Prereq: None

ENGL274 Caribbean Poetry and Cinema: "Fields of Islands" in an Open Sea

In this course, we will consider poetry and cinema that make radical images, sounds, and shapes of the Caribbean as a "field of islands"--islands that presume other islands, islands of foraging, convening, gathering, and concentrating on the small, in the words of Édouard Glissant--in an open, relational sea.

We will trace how the Enlightenment installs itself in the longstanding colonial tropes that render the Caribbean as a space outside of time, outside of history, perpetually under the sun, and, were it not for machetes, filled with redundantly bursting vegetation. This course will present an array of 20th-21st century Caribbean poetics and cinemas that deviate from, challenge, escape, and mangle these tropes and their spatio-temporal unimaginativeness. And we will investigate the ways that these texts and forms make use of the figures of sea, plantation, slavery, indigeneities, uprising, marronage, desire, revolution, apocalypse, vengeance, and imagination. Concerns of nationalism, development, humanism, capitalism, and subjectivity will manifest.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL275 Introduction to Writing Fiction

Fiction is a lie--a beautiful lie that holds inside it a human truth. In this class, we will explore this apparent contradiction and learn how to craft truthful lies. Over the course of the semester, we will read selected contemporary fiction, with a special emphasis on the craft of writing. We'll discuss characterization, point of view, plot, structure, dialogue, fictional time, and fictional space. You'll write one short story and bring it to class for your peers to critique, in a format commonly known as the "workshop." You will also revise this story, using techniques discussed in class. The aims of this course are: (a) to refine your understanding of the attributes, techniques, and styles of fiction; and (b) to help you improve your own writing through effective use of reader feedback and revision strategies. Readings may include work by Franz Kafka, Alifa Rifaat, J.M. Coetzee, Louise Erdrich, Julie Otsuka, Gabriel García Márquez, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT229
Prereq: None

ENGL275Z "Like Herding Cats"

What might it reveal that cats inhabit a common-parlance simile for the unwieldy? For that which cannot be gathered, not only without resistance but also without chaos? Is a simile for uncontrollability itself not a semantic and conceptual quandary? (Also, why are cats so meme-able?)

This course will explore the metaphorical and figurative uses of cats in 20th-century literature, experimental cinema, continental philosophy, and legal studies. What implications might figurative cats have for notions of sovereignty, a body politic, coercive consensus, and so on? We will consider the cultural, linguistic, and affective lineaments of representations of cats, sometimes, by looking at them directly (even though one always risks their disdain or indifference with direct engagement) in select works by Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jacques Derrida, Margaret Atwood, and others, and, sometimes, indirectly--through juxtaposition with a bestiary of animals that seem to generate other kinds of metaphors, such as dogs, pigs, possums, and snakes--in select works by Colin Dayan, Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Derby, and others. We will track the linguistic and iconographic tendencies in the Western imaginary of cats to signal something uncontrollable, peripatetic, esoteric, mysterious, luciferian, blackened, marked by the feminine, that understands and perhaps even has speech, but will not lower itself to mirror the limits of "civilized language." The assigned readings and viewings for this class engage Caribbean and "World" literatures, black critical theory, the figurative in representations of the history of slavery, deconstruction, French "New Wave" cinema, and animal studies.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: COL275Z
Prereq: None

ENGL276 South Asian Literature in the American Diasporas

The South Asian diaspora spans the world; communities are located in Africa, the Middle East, England, North and South America, and the Caribbean, as well as Southeast Asia. Using novels, poems, short stories, and film, as well as scholarship on history, this course will focus upon the literary and cultural production of the South Asian diaspora in the Americas, focusing especially on the United States. We will examine the conditions of historical arrival and identity-making under shifting regimes of politics, economics, and culture. What does being in the United States mean for the claiming of "Indian" and "American" identities, and how is this inflected by relationships with other ethnic or racial communities? The relationship with an often romanticized "India" is a central question, expressed through the concepts of diaspora, exile, and transnationalism. Consequently, what are the conditions of "authenticity," and of cultural authority? What aesthetic forms, questions, and issues express or preoccupy the artists of the South Asian American community?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GSAS
Identical With: GSAS273, AMST273
Prereq: None

ENGL277 Writing Fiction

Chinua Achebe was famous for his quote "If you don't like another person's story, write your own." Although disliking another's story could inspire creative writing, there are various reasons why people write, ranging from the basic human desire to understand the world through storytelling down to the desire to respond to the issues of the day--be it moral, political, religious--through fiction. The course is designed to help students gain skills in writing fiction; recognizing the literary conventions of fiction; reading and critiquing published work from a writer's perspective; making deliberate creative choices; engaging the work of others in a workshop setting; and revising their work using feedback from their peers and other writing strategies. As such, our reading list will be diverse in scope, cutting across various continents, races, and creeds. We will hope to use the work on the reading list as stepping points for creating our own stories whether in response to various prompts or as original stories to be discussed in workshops. At the end of the semester, you will not only have read a good chunk of fiction and have a good sense of how fiction works, you will also have produced--and substantially revised--some of that writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT270, AFAM281, COL370
Prereq: None

ENGL278 Writing on and as Performance

This course focuses on developing descriptive critical and creative writing skills in relation to both witnessing and staging live performance. Through close readings of texts by authors including José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer Doyle, Eileen Myles, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, Lidia Yuknavitch, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Glenn Ligon, Eve Sedgwick, Fred Moten, and Billy Ray Belcourt, this course will challenge students to craft ideas and arguments by enhancing critical and creative writing skills. We will experiment with style and form from academic arguments, to performance lectures, artist interviews, and free-form creative prose essays. Students will complete in-class writing assignments and exercises in response to written, recorded, and live performances by a range of contemporary artists. Students will also be asked to complete hybrid creative writing assignments in response to prompts that imagine writing as always in conversation with performance. More specifically, students will write pieces about embodiment, sound, and the visual. This class is particularly interested in ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are shaped by language, and how language as a performative tool can be a site for "insurrection" (Moten) and "listening in detail" (Vazquez).

This course encourages students to experiment with their writing practices. Over the course of the semester students will be asked to write four separate creative/critical pieces, all of which will be workshopped in the space of the classroom.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA235, FGSS235
Prereq: None

ENGL278Z Writing On and As Performance

This course focuses on developing descriptive critical and creative writing skills in relation to both witnessing and doing live performance. Through close readings of texts by authors including José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer Doyle, Eileen Myles, Lydia Davis, Hilton Als, Glenn Ligon, Claudia Rankine, Eve Sedgwick, Fred Moten, and Ann Pellegrini, this course will challenge students to craft ideas and arguments by enhancing critical reading skills, creative thinking, and clear writing. We will experiment with style and form from academic essays to performative writing, performance lectures, artist interviews, and free-form prose. Students will complete in-class writing assignments and exercises in response to written, recorded, and live performances by a range of contemporary artists. This class is particularly interested in ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are shaped by language, and how language as a performative tool can be a site for "insurrection" (Moten), "gaps, overlaps, dissonances" (Sedgwick), and "listening in detail" (Vazquez). Online course. Special schedule: 11am - 4pm (EST) January 10-13, 16-19.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA235Z
Prereq: None

ENGL279 Introduction to Latina/o/x Literature and Art

We will study Latina/o/x aesthetics and poetics to ask questions about the history, sociality, and semiotics of Latinidad, as well as the formation of Latina/o/x studies in the U.S. university. The course understands Latinidad as an assimilable disturbance, around which specific ethical questions may emerge. We will study modes of "ethnic," aesthetic, poetic, theoretical, and geographic disturbance--assimilated and unruly--specific to the semiotics of Latinidad and Latinx studies, as well as their relationship to Blackness, anti-Blackness, whiteness, form, language, ontology, race, gender, and assumptions of futurity. Readings, viewings, and listenings focus on the 20th century, but that temporal provision will surely be shot through by reference points from 1500 to 2020.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL280 Staging Race in Early Modern England

This course analyzes the dramatic representation of race in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We will examine the historical emergence of race as a cultural construct in relation to related conceptions of complexion, the humoral body, gender, sexuality, and religious, ethnic, and national identity. Readings focus on three racialized groups: Moors, Jews, and Native American "Indians." After reading the play-texts in relation to the historical moment in which they were first produced (using both primary and secondary sources) we will then consider their post-Renaissance performance histories, including literary, theatrical, and film adaptations.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: FGSS320, CHUM289, THEA290
Prereq: None

ENGL281 Award-Winning Playwrights

With textual analysis and intellectual criticism at its core, this course examines the dramatic work of award-winning playwrights through theoretical, performative, and aesthetic frames. The first half of our investigation explores companion texts written by premier playwrights. In the latter end of the course, we examine singular texts written by acclaimed newcomers. A select range of reviews and popular press publications help to supplement our discussions. In all cases, we are interested in surveying the ways in which these playwrights work within varying modes of dramatic expression and focus their plays on such topics as class, ethnicity, era, disability, gender, locale, nationality, race, and/or sexuality.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM279, THEA280
Prereq: None

ENGL282 Joyce's ULYSSES

A study of Joyce's 1922 text that looks closely at its formal innovations and its historical context. While secondary readings will include a range of critical responses to the novel, our emphasis will be on a close reading of Ulysses itself.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

ENGL283 Old Poetics for New Poets

We today tend to assume that poetry is lyrical, personal, emotional, and short. These assumptions are not universal truths but products of a specific historical moment; they were popularized by Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth at the turn of the 19th century. This class will explore poetry and poetics before Romanticism, when poems were as often public and political as personal, as often philosophical and scientific as emotional, as often book-length as quite short. These are poems in which metaphors are stretched to their furthest limits, and passions pop to life to figure in allegorical plots. In them, the lyric "I" is less important than the didactic "you," the narrative "he"/"she," or the satirical persona. We will explore the workings of different forms and figures in this old poetics, including meter, rhymes, couplets, personas, personifications, periphrases, and conceits. Wonderfully, some of these old techniques are in the ascendant again today: hip hop privileges rhyme, and post-humanism raises new questions about personification.

Students in this course will read poetry, but they will also write it. We will think about how older poetic techniques and tropes offer resources to new poets. Both trained and amateur poets are welcome!
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL284 Literary Perversions: Revolution, Democracy, Identity

The Federalist Papers wrote under the strong impression that the American Revolution was imperiled by an overwhelming debt and the lack of a national authority and identity to bind the States together. Public fear of moral degeneration via the replacement of the "Old World" symbolic order with a "New World" order under the aegis of "representative democracy" loomed over the republic.

Taking these concerns and the dissemination of The Federalist Papers as our point of departure, this course will examine how representations of "non-normative" identities in several major 19th-century works relate to the problems of representing democracy in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Many of the most famous canonical literary texts in the United States during the 19th century write about "non-normative" topics such as maternity, slavery, bestiality, and gender inequality in the context of narratives that attempt to rewrite the legacy of the American Revolution. By focusing on the literary treatment of these "perverse" topics, we shall attempt to understand whether the authors we will undertake close readings of in this course were successful in their endeavors to not only amend the shortcomings of the Revolution, but also to think more rigorously about the history of slavery and gender inequality.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM288
Prereq: None

ENGL285 Victorian Modes and Moods

This course offers an introduction to British literature from the 1830s to the 1870s, with an emphasis on the main artistic modes of the era such as realism, gothic, "sensation," scientific essays, and religious meditations. Each half of the course will center on a big novel that incorporates these storytelling styles: Wilkie Collins's *The Woman in White* and George Eliot's *Middlemarch.* We will also examine poetry, nonfiction prose, and paintings to explore how these modes opened up cross-genre and cross-media conversations. Central themes include changing concepts of personhood; relations between science, nature, and faith; the experience of embodiment; the languages of everyday life and of literature; and the role of art in the modern world. Throughout, we will investigate how artists used these modes to capture moods they saw as distinctively modern, from pessimism to optimism, from alienation to friendship and love.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL285Z Fantasy And Speculation

Please note: Students should expect some readings and assignments to be due during winter break, prior to beginning Winter Session. Please visit the Winter Session website for the full syllabus -- http://www.wesleyan.edu/wintersession.

In this class we will read fantasy written by multi-ethnic authors in a variety of genres, mostly in the United States in the long nineteenth century (1770-1920). Our readings include texts that feature supernatural beings and events in imaginary settings -- but also texts that take on well-known myths and legends, create fictional characters to participate in historical events, fold time and space to place historical characters in the midst of fictional events, or gesture toward radically different futures. This broad understanding of fantasy will challenge us to redefine its constitutive features. The choice of readings draws on the work of scholars committed to the recovery of little-known texts, especially by African American authors.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL286 Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of the first modern African American literary movement, known today as the Harlem Renaissance. Students will learn about the national and global contexts of this movement as well as the various debates that it generated, many of which still reverberate with Black writers today. These include the relationship between Black art and propaganda, the burdens of racial representation and the constraints of respectability politics placed on the individual Black artist, the right to opacity, and the relationship between race and form.

In this course, students will become familiar with some of the key texts of the Harlem Renaissance, its national and international contexts, and its recurring themes and debates. Furthermore, by reading and writing across a wide range of texts from this movement--including poems, short stories, novels, essays and manifestos--students will learn how to engage with a variety of genres. The assignments for this course are thus designed to teach students to write about not only specific genres, but also recurring themes in works from the Harlem Renaissance. By the final project, students will be able to pivot from writing about discrete forms and themes to writing to specific audiences.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM286, AMST282
Prereq: None

ENGL286Z "Writing Should Do Something": The Essays of James Baldwin

Baldwin's essays, both deeply personal and political, speak of a divided self in a divided country. As a Black man, he saw himself as a problem for America; as a gay man, he was a problem for many; and as a self-described "maverick," he resisted any identification other than "writer." He wrote frankly of hating, and being hated, while insisting that without love and compassion, even for those who hated him, a decent life was unattainable. In this course, we will consider Baldwin as one of the greatest essayists of his century, a social critic who believed that "writing should do something," in the words of a letter he wrote to his brother.

Baldwin began publishing to acclaim in the 1950s; he was a celebrated public figure in the fight for racial equality in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, however, his complicated relationship both with white liberals and leaders of the Black Power movement diminished his political stature. With the Obama presidency and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, his work experienced a renaissance: almost 30 years after Baldwin's death, Ta-Nehisi Coates acknowledged "The Fire Next Time," published in 1962, as the inspiration for "Between the World and Me."

This is not a theory course, either social or literary. While our supplementary material will place Baldwin's essays within their historical and social context, our focus will be on the narrative nonfiction techniques Baldwin used to such startling and timeless effect. We will read Baldwin's most famous essays, and some that are less well known. Our supplementary readings and viewings will explore his continuing influence, and the influence of Black music on Baldwin.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM288Z
Prereq: None

ENGL288 British Poetry from the French Revolution to the Death of Byron

This course provides an introduction to major poets of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Clare, and Keats--and to issues central to the study of Romanticism as an artistic movement. These issues include: how people experience nature; poetry's relationship to music, storytelling, and visual arts; new ideas about originality and literary experimentation; and poetic responses to the French Revolution and the social and economic change that mark the period. No experience with poetry or with British literature is expected; the course functions as an introduction to both.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL289 Intertextual Aesthetics in African American Culture: From Signifyin(g) to Sampling

Intertextuality, the integration of references to multiple texts into a single artistic work, has long been considered a hallmark of postmodern aesthetics. This course will begin from the premise that this intertextual approach was a foundational aesthetic technique for African American cultural producers long before any discourse around postmodernism entered the lexicon. From David Walker¿s "sampling" of the Declaration of Independence in making his 1830 anti-slavery Appeal, to Kara Walker¿s incorporations of imageries and artistic techniques of the antebellum South to comment on contemporary realities of blackness, African American artists have long made use of intertextual aesthetics not merely in the service of postmodern indirection, but in order to represent the realities of black lived experience in America. This course will investigate the transmedial history of this intertextual black aesthetic, examining African American literature, music, film, and visual art, and will consider various ways in which black intertextual aesthetics have been theorized, from Henry Louis Gates' notion of "signifyin(g)," to discussions of hip hop sampling and Black Twitter. As mass-mediated technologies have proliferated in the 20th and 21st centuries and representations of "Blackness" writ large have exponentially multiplied in the popular imagery, contemporary artists increasingly sample and signify on these representations themselves. So a significant piece of our work in the course will be in analyzing the ways that the intertextual aesthetic is mobilized in the contemporary moment to speak to material realities of postmodern blackness, and to articulate nuanced black subjectivities in the face of subjection.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM276
Prereq: None

ENGL290 Place, Character, and Design: Techniques in Writing Nonfiction and Fiction

The distinction between creative nonfiction and fiction is that nonfiction professes to tell the truth with very little embellishment. Rather than present reality as a series of raw facts, CNF writers borrow techniques of fiction writing--description, anecdote, scene construction, characterization, and dialogue--to tell dynamic and compelling true stories. In this course we will investigate craft aspects that are relevant in nonfiction and fiction such as establishing characters and a narrator's voice, building the spatial world and emotional tone of the narrative, and using structure to communicate what we want to say with the story or essay. This course will explore topics to help writers mine their lives and experiences for material in both genres. We will emphasize reading, writing, and critical thinking about narrative craft, operating on the philosophy that you must become a skilled critical reader to become a better writer. Students will study the work of a diverse range of established writers, respond to weekly writing prompts and exercises, and participate in several small group workshops leading to a longer narrative along with developing a writing habit founded on the knowledge that, as with any skill, good writing requires consistent practice and revision.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL291 The First Stories: Oral Poetry in Greece and Anglo-Saxon England

An introduction to the themes, techniques, poetics, and ideologies of the oldest surviving poems in Greek and Old English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL292 Techniques of Nonfiction

In this course, we will learn how to craft and revise short pieces of nonfiction writing that draw on our own life experiences and our observations of the world around us. To achieve this goal, we will constantly be creating and editing our own prose, and we will perform various writing exercises. Moreover, we will read our colleagues' nonfiction prose and offer them thoughtful, generous feedback. Finally, we will read various published nonfiction essays--memoirs, musings, reviews, and reportage--and we will analyze these pieces in order to understand how veteran authors narrate "real-life" stories in a way that is engaging, beautiful, and meaningful. Upon completing this course, you will have a deeper knowledge of how to construct resonant nonfiction narratives, and a better understanding of various literary concepts, including pacing, arc, imagery, place, and character. You will have learned how to harvest experiences and observations from your own life in order tell a story that reveals subtle but acute information about the larger world.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL292A Techniques of Nonfiction: Memory and Memoir

Taking the shifting nature of memory--sometimes fluid, often repressed, shape-shifting, nonlinear, occasionally contradictory--as our starting point, we will read and write memoirs, personal essays, and experiments. We will examine how writers convey not only remembered events but also the events' lasting emotional and symbolic significance, almost invisibly, within the technical aspects of their texts. As we read and write, we will consider the relationship between content and form in personal nonfiction, and we will explore the various ways writers employ narrative and anti-narrative structures when writing about oneself and one's own life. In other words, this semester, you--everything that composes who you are as an individual--will be your primary subject matter as we think about memory, consciousness, the (un)reliability of linearity and "truth," and language's relationship with time, presence, and place. We will look deeply into the complexities of what it means to be a person in the world with language alive inside of us. We will walk into the rooms of our memories and heritages. We will question our relationships with temporality and language, and we will dredge up--in order to write through--our most impossible thoughts.

We will divide our time between reading contemporary investigations into nonfiction forms--the memoir and anti-memoir, experimental fictions that cull from one's life and heritage, the lyric essay, and hybrid essay forms--and writing our own nonfiction texts in response. There will be biweekly presentations, in-class writing experiments, and intensive workshops of one another's work. The class will culminate in a book arts project and a reflective essay.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL292Z Techniques of Nonfiction

Techniques of Nonfiction is a five-week introductory-level course in creative writing. We'll be focusing on some of the basic elements of writing nonfiction. You'll write four nonfiction assignments, contribute weekly writing prompts and written reflections on assigned readings, and generate peer reviews of your classmates' writings. Through guided practice in writing, and through assigned readings and video lectures, you'll learn the basics of writing nonfiction. (The course will consist of a blend of recorded lectures and synchronous office hours and conferences, scheduled according to student availability.)
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL293 Afro-Asian Intersections in the Americas

This course explores a range of historical, cultural, and political intersections between African and Asian diasporic people in the Americas from the late 19th century to the present. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will examine key moments in the history of Afro-Asian encounters in the Americas, including the importation of slave and coolie labor in the 19th century, the formation of anticolonial and antiracist "Third World" movements in the United States and abroad, and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. We will also study forms of cultural interracialism, from African Americans' mania for kung fu in the 1970s, to interracial buddy films like Rush Hour (1998), to the contemporary fiction of writers such as Patricia Powell and Charles Johnson.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST291, AFAM291
Prereq: None

ENGL294 Edith Wharton and the Art and Science of Fiction

Edith Wharton's prolific literary career coincided with two major developments in the history of fiction: the emergence (associated with Flaubert and Henry James) of the novel as a form of high art, and the rise (associated with Zola and Frank Norris) of the "naturalist" novel and its claim to represent a newly scientific depiction of human life. Although these new schools of fiction have often been thought of as antagonists, Wharton participated enthusiastically in both. In this research seminar, we will consider the ways that Wharton responded to both aestheticism and naturalism and the reasons she considered them appropriate to her depiction of contemporary life--especially in relation to the issues crucial to her fiction of gender, marriage, and sexuality.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL295 Reading Theories

In this survey of theories that have shaped the reading of literature and the analysis of culture, emphasis is on key concepts--language, identity, subjectivity, gender, power, and knowledge--and on key figures and schools such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure, Barthes, Gramsci, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Jameson, Berlant, Moten, postmodernism, and U.S. feminism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: COL339, CLST393, CEAS340, RL&L290, GRST231, RUSS340, RULE340, REES340
Prereq: None

ENGL296 Techniques of Fiction

This introduction to the elements of fiction and a range of authors is for students who want to write and, through writing, increase their understanding and appreciation of a variety of short stories.

This is a class for those with a deep love of the written word and a boundless curiosity for what transpires when the imagination is given room to roam. We will work together to develop certain skills: a poet's love of metaphor and gift of compression; a playwright's sense of dramatic tension; an essayist's penchant for startling observations and investigation; and a translator's attention to meaning and language. We'll attend to the customary struggles of fiction writers: moving people around in time and space; showing rather than explaining; giving people things to say that sounds natural and revelatory; and making sure everybody wants something they can't have and shouldn't get. In other words, we will be looking at elements of fiction such as action, character development, plot, dialogue, and description. We'll be reading short stories by the acknowledged experts. And we will be focusing intensely on revision as an act of re-visioning your stories. I repeat: Be prepared to revise.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL296Z Techniques of Fiction

ONLINE COURSE: Synchronous class meetings via Zoom 1:00pm-4:30pm, Classes held on Jan 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17. Please note: Students should expect some readings and assignments to be due during winter break, prior to the beginning of Winter Session class meetings. ENGL 296 is an introduction to fiction course that emphasizes reading, writing, and critical thinking about story. This workshop operates on the philosophy that you must become a skilled critical reader of fiction to become a better writer and to articulate your impressions and criticisms when we workshop the stories of your peers. We will read selected stories to facilitate our craft discussion, supplemented by the textbook readings. You will write a story of approximately 4000 words, and we'll use the techniques of fiction and feedback from workshop to take it from rough first draft to a polished story. Syllabi for Winter Session courses will be posted to https://www.wesleyan.edu/wintersession/courses.html as soon as they are available.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL297 Practical Criticism

In the early twentieth century, I.A. Richards, an instructor in English Literature at Cambridge, ran an experimental class he called "practical criticism." Each week, he distributed a single poem to his students without revealing the poem's title, author, and date of publication. He asked students to take the poem home, read it as many times as they felt necessary, and write a brief essay that simultaneously judged and interpreted the poem. This course revives Richards's experiment for the twenty-first century. We will follow Richards's protocols for a different set of twelve poems, which students must read, judge, and interpret. (Students must vow not to use Google to identify the authors.) The first half of seminar will be spent discussing the poems and the students' judgments of them; the second half will be spent reflecting on the discussions in the first half, with the help of theoretical writings by Immanual Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Theodor Adorno, Frank Sibley, John Guillory, and Sianne Ngai.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: WRCT262, COL267
Prereq: None

ENGL298 Richard Wright and Company

This course offers an in-depth consideration of the work and career of Richard Wright, a defining figure in 20th-century African American literature, and seeks to understand Wright's interactions with a wide array of mentors, proteges, and enemies. By placing Wright amid the network of supporters, admirers, and detractors who surrounded him, we will gain a deepened understanding of Wright's development and a useful map of 20th-century African American literary expression and American literary history more broadly. Writers to be covered in the course may include, along with Wright, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin,Gwendolyn Brooks, Horace Cayton, Ralph Ellison, James T. Farrell, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Walker, John Williams, and Frank Yerby.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM298
Prereq: None

ENGL299 Introduction to Fiction

This course introduces students to the craft of short-story writing. In the first half of the course, we'll read and discuss stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Edward P. Jones, Kazuo Ishiguro, Akhil Sharma, and other successful writers as a means of exploring the conventions (and contentions) of the short-story form. In the second half of the course, students will use their newly filled "writer's toolbox" to plan, draft, and ultimately share their own stories with the rest of the class, while also learning to provide focused, supportive feedback for each other along the way.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT212
Prereq: None

ENGL300 Shakespeare's Sonnets

An investigation of the Mona Lisa of literature, Shakespeare's Sonnets, that will undertake a close reading of the texts considered both as formal models and as a narrative of both homoerotic and heteronormative sexualities.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL300A Creative Writing Workshop: Multi-Genre: Writing Ecologies

How can environmental literatures wake us up to the more-than-human world, re-wild our senses and syntaxes, realign our perspectives, and call forth an awakened sense of belonging? How do the lenses of culture, gender, and class affect how we observe and describe the world in which we live? How might thinking, synergistically, as an ecosystem forge new lenses, new emotional and intellectual centers?

In this open-genre workshop, we will read and write texts that honor a wider ecological consciousness, that celebrate the interconnectedness of the biota, and that are a call to action. We will keep field notebooks, perform site-specific writing experiments, apply permacultural perspectives to the ways we language and read our environments, take steps toward bioregional literacy, consider interspecies encounters, climate change, sustainability, environmental justice, geologic time, artistic-practice-as-research, and bear witness as acts of remediation.

We will divide our time between reading environmental literatures in nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and hybrid forms and writing our own texts in conversation. There will be weekly presentations, writing experiments, suggested field trips, and workshops of one another's work. The class will culminate in a book arts project and reflective essay.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216 OR ENGL292 OR ENGL296ENGL216 OR ENGL292 OR ENGL296

ENGL301 1492: States of War

This course approaches 1492 as a signifier and time-stamp of modernity. It signifies and time-stamps an ongoing war against people of African descent. It grounds systems of representation, racialization, and colonization with which we must reckon. By reading richly symptomatic, primary, historical documents about "blood," race, geography, and slavery in Saint Domingue/Santo Domingo, as well as some contemporary fiction, art, and critical theory that re-narrate and theorize Caribbean history, we will focus on the historical frame of 1440 into the 18th century. This frame holds with specific reference to Frank B. Wilderson III's notion of when the "gratuitous violence" of the Middle Ages begins "to mark the Black ontologically." We will read sometimes for imperial notions of sovereignty, Man, selfhood, force, race, land, property, and labor, and other times for Caribbean notions and narratives that are at war with said imperial, Christian, Western onto-epistemological schemata. Conceptually, the course thinks from and about Caribbean literary studies, Black critical theory, aspects of Enlightenment thought, and deconstruction.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM303
Prereq: None

ENGL302 Special Topics: Environmental Fiction

In this course, we will study contemporary fiction that grapples with our changing environment alongside critical texts that contextualize environmental literature through the lenses of race, sexuality, and place, as well as post-coloniality, decolonization, and tourism, with a view to understanding what this means for fiction writers interested in writing about such topics. Some questions we might ask include: What do we mean by terms such as 'wilderness' or 'nature'? To whom does 'nature' belong, and what are the differing or contradictory ways in which different groups of individuals interpret and navigate it? How do we, as creative writers, write about the environment, especially in the current moment, in a manner that is urgent, ethical and fresh? If we believe in the power of fiction to change the world around us, what tools of craft do we have at our disposal to imagine a future we want to live in? This course is a seminar-workshop hybrid, i.e. the first half of the semester will be spent reading and discussing assigned books, the second half of the semester will be a workshop in which students write and discuss their own stories.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL296

ENGL303 Narrative Theory

Narrative, one great critic suggests, may be the central function of the human mind. It is, as another once wrote, "simply there, like life itself." As these claims indicate, narrative gives form to our collective experience: from the shadow of history and the shape of the future to the very texture and meaning of time itself. This course provides an introduction to the tradition of narrative theory--the theory of how stories work and of how we make them work--through a sustained engagement with three core narrative-theoretical concepts: structure, text, and time. A single book will anchor and orient each of the course's units: for structure, Vladimir Propp's MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE; for text, Roland Barthes's S/Z; for time, Gérard Genette's NARRATIVE DISCOURSE. Herman Melville's novella BENITO CERENO will supply our "control text," a narrative to which we will return as we study the theory and through which we will test the powers and the limits, both analytical and historical, of our theorists. In each of our units, we will begin with a careful reading of our main theorist, move on to consider work that elaborates on the theory, and then turn to robust approaches--Marxist, historicist, queer, psychoanalytic, sociological--that challenge or modify the theoretical terms with which we started.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL304 Lyric Poetry and Music: The Color and Politics of Cry, Sound, and Voice

Lyric poetry may be the most musical of literary forms. In one of its basic definitions, the lyric poem begins after the overhearing of a sound. This sound may be familiar and pleasant, like the timbre and cadence of a lover's voice. Or it may be unrecognizable and terrifying. It may be imbricated with other senses and feelings, provoking a memory that stimulates a sense of touch or smell. Or it may stimulate a sense of horror at the inevitability of death. In any of these cases, sound is thought to reveal an attachment, a memory, and to give rise to composition in the poet's effort to reshape memory and feeling in lyric form. But such articulations do not always come out as evenly as this description may imply. Indeed, moans, screams, stutters, cries, and the madness of possession by the Muses are part of lyric's history and practice. In this course, we will read from African American, African diasporic, Caribbean, Latina/o/x, and Indigenous poetics, and we will consider their relation to myth and musical forms, such as the blues, son, bomba, biguine, jazz, reggae, hip-hop, salsa, among others. The dynamics between lyric speakers and musicians, sound and story, seen and voiced language will play out.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST302, AFAM305
Prereq: None

ENGL305 Shakespeare's Macbeth: From Saga to Screen

A close reading of Shakespeare's play that will position the play in terms of its historical and political contexts and its relation to early modern discourses on the feminine, witchcraft, and the divinity of kings. We will begin with a consideration of the historical legends that constitute Shakespeare's "sources," then read the play slowly and closely, coupling our discussions with readings from the period, exploring how Shakespeare's contemporaries thought of the political and cultural issues raised in the play. We will then compare how our contemporaries have recast these concerns by comparing scenes from films of MACBETH from 1948 to the present.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: THEA310
Prereq: None

ENGL306 Asian American Posthumanisms: Biopolitics, Ecopoetics, and Literature

From 19th-century anxieties concerning subhuman coolies to 21st-century celebrations of suprahuman cyborgs, United States discourses have always figured people of Asian descent as peripheral to the category of the human. While Asian Americanist scholarship has often responded by asserting the humanity of Asian Americans, a number of scholars and writers have begun to explore and even embrace the inhuman character of the Asian American. Drawing from recent scholarship in science studies, political ecology, anthropology, and literary studies, this course will consider what it looks like to shift the scale of analysis from the individual, organismal human to the social logics, biopolitical infrastructures, and ecological entanglements that supersede the human, or conversely, to the bodily fragments, molecular processes, and fragments that subtend the scale of the human. We will pay particular attention to the question of what consequences decentering the human has for the ethnic novel, a genre often valued for its ability to affirm the humanity of racialized subjects. For instance, what kinds of aesthetics and politics emerge from an imaginary centered not on the human individual but on systems, landscapes, entanglements, and other imaginative forms and social practices? What does a novel centered not on a human protagonist but on an object, a clone, or an ecosystem look like?

To explore these non-human centered logics and forms, we will read theoretical texts by Anne Cheng, Rey Chow, Donna Haraway, Aihwa Ong, Rachel Lee, Nikolas Rose, Anna Tsing, and others, alongside a selection of contemporary (and capaciously defined) Asian/American novels by writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Larissa Lai, Chang-rae Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

ENGL307 Literature, Laughter, Philosophy: Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne's novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) has been described as a literary masterpiece, a hilarious satire, a sentimental tear-jerker, and an irreligious abomination. It was a favorite of Karl Marx and Friedrich Neitzsche, and it was heralded (in a recent film adaptation) as "a postmodern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about." The book is deeply learned--engaging texts from skeptical philosophy to 18th-century science and from Hamlet to early novels. It is also, indisputably, very odd. Though Tristram is trying to tell the story of his life, he fails to get himself born in the first hundred pages, and the text is full of doodles, blank pages, madcap digressions, and missing chapters.

In this course, we will read Tristram Shandy alongside the many, many texts it references, borrows from, and mocks, as well as the many, many texts it has influenced. Throughout, we will take Tristram Shandy as our rich test case for some fundamental theoretical questions: What is literature, and why do we tell stories anyway? How is literature related to philosophy? How do our minds work? What is the meaning of human life--of laughter, learning, love, and death?

This course is a research seminar that will prepare students to write an English thesis. Students will cultivate their skills in writing and research, in engaging thoughtfully and confidently with theoretical and critical secondary sources. The course will culminate in a major research paper.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL308 All the Feels: Affect Theory and Cultural Studies

Butterflies in your chest. Perspiration on your upper lip. A racing heart. Every day we witness and manage sensorial experiences; quite often these negotiations illuminate the ways in which powerful norms and institutions shape our daily lives. This course explores the relationship between the seemingly individualized experience of feeling and the social world of power by introducing students to the vibrant field of affect studies. A recent "turn" in critical theory, affect theory is interested in embodiment, the senses, and sensorial experience, questioning the dominance of rationality and cognition by exploring the role emotions and feelings play in our social worlds. This course will focus predominantly on affect theory as it emerged from queer, feminist, and racialized minoritarian discourses in order to ultimately contemplate the ways theories of affect, feeling, sensation, embodiment, and emotion open up literary and cultural texts.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT302, FGSS314
Prereq: None

ENGL309 Entertaining Social Change

"Our problem," Tom Frank writes, "is that we have a fixed idea of what power is, of how power works, and of how power is to be resisted." This is especially true of "entertainment." Power that may not seem like power--only, say, like "fun" or "amusement"--can be especially powerful. A thread that connects all of our texts will be: how has the systemic critique of social contradictions been popularized as compelling and fascinating in modern times? A related concern: what are the seductions and violence built into "enjoyment---"enjoyment" that reproduces "Americans"? We will "entertain" the diverse strategies that progressive moviemakers have developed to entertain Americans--to teach, persuade, seduce, provoke, upset, anger, and move them through laughter, tears, and not least of all ideas--so that Americans will be more inclined to "entertain" social critique that inspires and envisions social change.

Our critical focus will be on the popularizing (and sometimes the selling) of social critique in movies including Straight Outta Compton, Malcolm X, Medium Cool, Network, El Norte, Smoke Signals, Before the Flood, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Salt of the Earth, Matewan, and The Big Short. We will place special emphasis on self-reflexive movies about "entertainment" and about labor/social movement organizing. Entertainment, we will see, plays a key role in organizing and reorganizing Americans. In doing so, it can place limits on our vision of what--and who--needs to be changed. By putting our movies in conceptual dialogue and making these limits more visible, we will help one another think, see, and feel beyond these limits. As we are "entertained" (and we will be) we will consider the stakes of being "entertained."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST315, FGSS315
Prereq: None

ENGL310 The Medieval Beast

How did medieval writers think about the distinction between human and animal? This course will begin with the categories of soul and body, ruler and ruled, speech and noise--among others. We will also read about human-animal hybrids like werewolves and bird-men in order to think through some of these binaries. Texts will include bestiaries (encyclopedias of animals), treatises on hunting, beast-fables from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions, Marie de France's "Lais" and "Fables," Chrétien de Troyes's "Knight of the Lion," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and Chaucer's "Parliament of Fowls."
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: MDST312
Prereq: None

ENGL311 Modernist Writers: Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys

This course will allow readers to explore and engage with the oeuvres of two important but very different female modernist writers. We will read major and minor works of both novelists, but we will also dip into their short stories, essays, diaries, and/or memoirs. In addition, we will also read some of the most significant criticism on both authors to understand how their critical status has been established and modified in the decades since their works were first published.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL312 Vitalism and Black Aesthetics

What is the relationship between Black art and Black life? Does Black art, broadly construed, serve a mimetic function-merely re-presenting reality-or is it a vital expression of the essence of Blackness? These questions are at the root of Black Cultural Studies' engagements with the problem of the aesthetic. In the current conjuncture, reacting to the theorization of Black social death, many theorists have (re)turned to the aesthetic as "proof" of the mattering of Black life and "evidence" of a vibrant sociality. This course will consider the connection between (the theorization of) Black aesthetics and (the affirmation of) Black life. In so doing, we will question the political stakes of Black aesthetics, as well as the value placed upon the concept of life as such, in and through the aesthetic encounter. Additionally, we will explore ways of thinking of the aesthetic that challenge presumptions of its innate liveliness. Readings will include canonical texts in aesthetic theory and vitalist philosophy, as well as more contemporary engagements with these questions from the perspective of Black performance theory, literary theory, and Afro-pessimism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM311
Prereq: None

ENGL313 Literatures of Empire

This seminar will reexamine the literary and cultural history of Britain by tracing the emergence of "English literature" from the same transatlantic crucible as the racial categories of Enlightenment empire. Through readings from English literature's early origins in the Anglo-American transatlantic to its consolidation during the apex of the British empire, we will look at how the genres most frequently associated with liberal individualism (novels, lyric poetry) run parallel to the emergence of visual and rhetorical categories for imagining the boundaries and limits of the human and the individual. We'll focus on the techniques of literary form--and literary study--that helped construct and make sense of empire. Over the course of the semester, we will consider how the conceptual crises and contradictions in the production of British imperial power through the tangled nexus of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery spurred on new genres (the historical novel, the colonial anti-bildungsroman, the imperial gothic), and how novelists wrestled with the period's key categories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality. Along the way, we'll trace how an archive of imperial writings have been taken up by anti- and decolonial theorists and writers.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL314 Circulating Bodies: Commodification, Sex Work, and Enslavement in Eighteenth Century England

In the newly booming consumer culture of Enlightenment England, people were constantly buying and selling things--bespoke suits and manufactured trinkets as well as human bodies. Sex workers used their bodies to enter into trade agreements, and the imperial economy was built on the enslavement of African people. This course will explore how people and things were turned into circulating objects, and it will trace these as they were passed from hand to hand, valued and revalued, used, abused, and discarded. We will listen as the "things" themselves tell ethically and socially urgent stories. In the period, consumer objects, sex workers, and enslaved peoples all wrote memoirs (or had ones imagined for them). We will read these texts alongside contemporary debates about economics, labor, race, abolition, and women's rights, and we will return again and again to fundamental questions about personal identity, individual agency and passivity, commodification, objectification, and the very limits of the human.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL315 Close, Distant, Archival, Experimental: New Methods of Literary Study

What does it mean to craft a "new" approach to literary study? And why is it that since at least the early twentieth century literary critics have insisted on the need for "new" methods? This course examines the different moments in literary history when literary critics developed "new" methods to read literature--particularly efforts to understand literature at scale and in context. We will look at theoretical approaches to literature, ranging from Edith Rickert's obscure 1927 New Methods for the Study of Literature through mid-century New Criticism, up to the movements and methods of the late twentieth century and present day, alongside the archives of everyday sites where literature is constituted and practiced--such as colonial lending library records and course syllabi--in order to examine what's at stake in determining the object, scope, and ends of literary study.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL316 Rethinking World Literature

Globalization has changed the speed at which people, goods, information, and ideas circulate in space, altering how we read and write and what we read and write about. This course examines the resurgence of the category "world literature" to explore how globalization affects practices of writing and reading in the 21st century. What does the "world" in "world literature" mean, and who writes world literature? To better understand how economic, environmental, technological, and political transformations affect our understanding of world literature, we will read pivotal theoretical works in the expansive field of world literature alongside several recent novels that thematize these scales of global comparison.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL317 Gothic Bodies

This seminar examines the Gothic mode and its literary afterlives in the texts of the British empire. During the nineteenth-century, the Gothic mode--darkened old houses, discoverable family secrets, mysterious moving objects, threatened bodies--migrated to a wide range of narrative forms. We will read some of this range, exploring early political fiction, science fiction, slave narratives, domestic fiction, and the ghost story. We'll think about how the Gothic mode was used to imagine different kinds of harm to bodies. We'll explore how these formal conventions involving unseen terrors, old family houses, and threatened bodies intersected with some of the key formations of the period: the rise of individualism, industrial and racial capitalism, Orientalism, automation, changes in property and inheritance law, theories of freedom and slavery and sexual consent. Along the way, we'll read key theorists who write about the Gothic as we develop our own theories of how to read the ways this genre still haunts our present.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL318 Black Literary Theory

This course will bring together readings both literary and critical/theoretical, beginning with Frantz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952). Taking Fanon as its point of departure, then, this course will necessarily turn to a discussion of the recent discourse on Afro-pessimism and Black optimism, attempting to introduce students to important issues and questions of race, race relations, anti-Black racism, Black sociality, the universality of whiteness and white supremacy, the fungibility of the Black body, and the vulnerability and precarity of Black life; and together we will think more closely about how the complex and "unthinkable" histories and afterlives of chattel slavery, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the Middle Passage, for examples, continue to challenge the representational limits and potentialities of traditional literary genres and modes of emplotment. In addition to Fanon, authors will include Orlando Patterson, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM315
Prereq: None

ENGL319 Asian American Posthumanisms: Biopolitics, Ecopoetics, and Literature

From 19th-century anxieties concerning subhuman coolies to 21st-century celebrations of suprahuman cyborgs, U.S. discourses have always figured people of Asian descent as peripheral to the category of the human. While Asian Americanist scholarship has often responded by asserting the humanity of Asian Americans, a number of scholars and writers have begun to explore and even embrace the inhuman character of the Asian American. Drawing from recent scholarship in science studies, political ecology, anthropology, and literary studies, this course will consider what it looks like to shift the scale of analysis from the individual, organismal human to the social logics, biopolitical infrastructures, and ecological entanglements that supersede the human, or conversely, to the body parts, molecular processes, and fragments that subtend the scale of the human. We will pay particular attention to the question of what consequences decentering the human has for the ethnic novel, a genre often valued for its ability to affirm the humanity of racialized subjects. For instance, what kinds of aesthetics and politics emerge from an imaginary centered not on the human individual but on systems, landscapes, entanglements, and other imaginative forms and social practices? What does a novel centered not on a human protagonist but on an object, a clone, or an ecosystem look like? To explore these nonhuman centered logics and forms, we will read a selection of theoretical texts by Asian American and other authors, alongside a selection of contemporary (and capaciously defined) Asian/American novels by writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Larissa Lai, Ruth Ozeki, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST320
Prereq: None

ENGL320 The Senses and the Subject in Cinema and Poetry

In this course, we will study a mixture of emotionally stimulating and structurally difficult contemporary cinema and lyric poetry, as well as select philosophical and theoretical approaches to the senses and the subject. Do theories and notions of the senses assume the subject, and/or subjectivity? If so, then how? What is the relationship between embodiment, the senses, the world, racialization, blackness, and being? How do select Western theoretical, aesthetic, and poetic frameworks represent and think as such? While cinema and lyric poetry might seem like strange neighbors, this course specifically foregrounds them as "repositor[ies] of synesthesia," where not only the reconstitution of the subject after some disturbance (i.e., sensorial, physiological, social, historical, etc.) will be relevant to how we read, but also when that either does not happen or constitutively cannot happen. (Note that some short fiction may also be part of the course readings.)
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST304, FGSS310
Prereq: None

ENGL321 Insubstantial Pageants: Late Shakespeare

This seminar examines the Center for the Humanities' Spring 2020 theme of "Ephemera" through the lens of four late plays by Shakespeare ("Hamlet," "King Lear," "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest") and their preoccupation with the time, temporality, belatedness, and the ephemerality of theater (and the world-as-stage).

In addition to considering the mutability of the play-texts themselves (several of which exist in multiple versions), we will consider how they refashion their sources, and how they are themselves refashioned in later productions and adaptations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM337, THEA337
Prereq: None

ENGL322 Samuel Beckett

This seminar will be an adventure through immersion in the prose of an uncompromising modernist whose work would have revolutionized the possibilities for literature--and didn't.

We will focus intensively on Beckett's major novels (anti-novels) and short prose, with some attention to the poems and letters. Our reading will concern matters of style and form, and we will attempt to situate the texts within the political and social force fields they so often seem to defy.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL323 Staging the Real in Early Modern England

The stage in Shakespeare's time was by modern standards "relatively bare," lacking illusionistic sets that would later be relied upon to conjure the reality of a particular time and place onstage. What, then, defined the "real" prior to the emergence of modern theatrical realism and the illusionistic conventions associated with it? What representational strategies (of text, costume, props, sound, stage machinery, etc.) were used to convey "realness" onstage at the Globe and other early English theaters, which lacked the "fourth wall" of the proscenium arch that separated the realities of the play-world from those of everyday life?

This course explores the dramaturgy of the "real" in early modern England in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities Spring 2024 theme of "Get Real," in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that experimented with new ways of bringing to life the realities of war, true crime, sex and gender "deviance," street life and lingo in London's underworld, serendipitous wealth gleaned from capitalistic enterprise, and other sensational news ripped from the headlines.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM320
Prereq: None

ENGL324 Black Power and the Modern Narrative of Slavery

The historical moment immediately after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements saw an explosion of African American writing about slavery. In the past half-century, black writers wrote award-winning novels that gave unprecedented attention to the intricacies of the life of people who are enslaved and to slavery as a system that they suggested could help us better understand late-20th-century American culture. We will read some of the most important works written by contemporary African American writers to see how and why they transformed the first autobiographical form for black writers--the slave narrative--into a fictional form that has served them as they dissect their own cultural moment.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM324, AMST334
Prereq: None

ENGL324Z Black Power and the Modern Narrative of Slavery

ENGL325 Intermediate Nonfiction Workshop

What is a lyric essay? What happens when we open the sentence to lyricism, inviting poetry into the paragraph? What happens when we leave room for silence, the unknown, wonder or multiplicity within narrative trajectory? What happens if we invite diaspora, queerness, grief, or even the land itself into syntax? Why compose in a liminal form-between-forms? In this generative workshop, we will ask these questions and devote ourselves to reading and writing experiments in the essay. Books will be approached as companion texts and guides. There will be weekly presentations, in-class writing experiments, and intensive workshops of one another's work. The class will culminate in a book arts project and reflective essay. Special attention will also be given to cultivating community and the benefits of sustaining an embodied writing practice during extreme times.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL224 OR ENGL228 OR ENGL278 OR ENGL292 OR ENGL326 OR ENGL266

ENGL326 Advanced Nonfiction Workshop

In this upper-level nonfiction workshop, we will read texts that investigate the meanings of place, particularly as they concern intersecting intimacies and violences of home, of migration, of colonial settlement, of environmental racism, and of climate crisis. Being from, leaving, and returning to both actual and imagined spaces are often at stake in these texts, as are forms of enclosure, naming, and mapping. Questions about how language moves on a page are inextricable from these concerns. Your own writing will include short exercises and experiments, a longer essay, revision, and responses to the published work, and throughout the semester, we will attend collectively to your work, as well as to these published texts. This course is part of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Pedagogical Initiative.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL327 Criticism and Psychoanalysis

This course introduces some classical psychoanalytic methods of reading and interpretation, with accent on the four concepts Jacques Lacan identified as foundational: the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. We will approach psychoanalysis as a style of close reading whose influence on forms of interpretation--especially literary interpretation--has been immeasurable. One central concern will be the capacity of psychoanalysis to enable us to read ourselves reading, to make the interpretive situation itself the object of our analysis. Students with an interest in literary-critical methods will benefit from the course, as will students with an interest in the internal logic of an important body of thought.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: RL&L327, GRST227
Prereq: None

ENGL328 Researching and Writing Historical Narrative Nonfiction: A Workshop

Historical Nonfiction will be a workshop-based course. Students will have the opportunity to work on a project led by Charles Barber, a book-in-progress of historical narrative nonfiction based in Palm Beach, Florida in the 1920s. The project involves a decade-longs conflict between a gang and two father and son sheriffs, set against the explosive (and often corrupt) growth of Palm Beach as a resort in the early 19th century. Students will work with court and governmental records, as well as archival materials of all sorts. Students will receive professional credit for their contributions. A focus of the first part of the course will be historical methodology and evaluation of records; the second half of the course will address the question of transforming historical materials into compelling narratives. Readings will include models of historically based nonfiction, such as David Grann's Killer of the Flower Moon and Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL301
Prereq: None

ENGL329 Special Topic: Writing and Reading Short Stories

Each week we will be reading two of the class's short stories, in progress or completed, plus a published story. Over the course of the semester, students will complete three stories, length is negotiable. As class participants, students should bring their most thorough and considered observations about the works to the conversation, which means reading both the student pieces and the published stories several times. Students will be writing detailed comments on the manuscripts and an overall critique of at least one double-spaced page.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL292 OR ENGL296 OR ENGL325 OR ENGL339

ENGL330 Bookending Modernism: Eliot and Dylan

This course is a study of the emergence of literary modernism and its postmodern progeny in epic, focusing on close studies of Eliot's "Waste Land" and Dylan's "Desolation Row."
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL331 Post Cold War Narratives of Migration to the U.S.

In this course, we will study post-cold war U.S. immigrant literature. Published in a period of shifting politics, particularly for racialized migrants, these texts illuminate new iterations of what it means to be and belong in a world where capital, labor, materials, products, and people were experiencing new forms of global im/mobility. We will read a variety of diasporic fiction from a range of localities to consider the ways imperialism, colonialism, militarism, religious proselytizing, and racial capitalism are in dialogue with the murky experiences of family, desire, loss, home, mobility, culture, trauma, and belonging. In doing so, we seek to understand how macro, micro, interpersonal, and intrapsychic experiences and institutions shape migratory routes and the stories that emerge across them. We will address literature through an interdisciplinary lens by reading fiction alongside sociology, history, economics, political theory, and more in order to consider what the world of the fictive can tell us about migration that other disciplines may not be able to articulate with such emphasis and attunement as literature.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT303, AMST263
Prereq: None

ENGL332 About Clothes: Styles, Histories, Activisms, Poetics

In this course you will learn about some of the looks, discourses, forms of work, sensory meanings, and embodied histories relevant to/circulating around the wearing and study of clothing, in our time-place and at selected points over the past several hundred years. The syllabus includes works of literature, scholarship, visual art, performance, journalism, and activism. Among the questions we will ask: What does it mean to read clothes? How may we understand the transatlantic and global circuits that have informed various fashion systems, including ideas about who may wear what kinds of clothes? How and why have the labor, products, pleasures, and pains of this (multi-billion-dollar) business been understood as trivial? Throughout the semester, you will conduct your own experiments at the intersections of language, identities, and the materiality of clothing.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS333, CHUM333
Prereq: None

ENGL333 Special Topic: Novel Forms

In this special topics course, we will undertake a study and writing in long-form prose work. While our primary examples might most easily be classified "fiction," we may also engage periodically in complicating such designation. Engagement with the reading list will be based upon arising concerns within current and more historical pieces. Classroom discussion will help us develop a series of theories and practices beyond the pale of the standardized.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216 OR ENGL292 OR ENGL296

ENGL334 Special Topic: Something in the Air: Mining the Oral/Aural Tradition in African American Poetry

In his book-length manifesto, Poetry as an Insurgent Act, Lawrence Ferlinghetti claims that "the printing press killed poetry." What he seems to be lamenting--at least, in part--is the privileging of the written word to the detriment of poetry's musical, or aural, qualities. In this advanced-level workshop, we will focus on the poem as something intended to be read aloud and listened to. This course will also examine the roots and evolution of the African American oral poetic tradition with special attention paid to the rhetorical strategies derived from the black church, adopted by civil rights leaders and speech writers, and used to varying degrees by poets ranging from those of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s to practitioners of contemporary hip-hop and spoken word. Some of the poets under consideration include Amiri Baraka, Oscar Brown Jr., Jayne Cortez, Gil-Scott Heron, June Jordan, The Last Poets, Carl Hancock Rux, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Jessica Care Moore, Laini Mataka, and Saul Williams.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM334
Prereq: ENGL216 OR ENGL336 OR ENGL337

ENGL335 Wordsworth and Blake

This course examines the long, parallel careers of the two greatest poets of their generation writing in English: William Wordsworth and William Blake. Although they exerted little or no influence upon one another, their writing developed along strikingly similar paths as it responded to--and shaped--the rapidly changing, often disorienting literary, political, and cultural world of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain. We will examine the artists and events that inspired them, from John Milton to Robert Burns to the French Revolution. We will bring into conversation their songs, autobiographical poems, aesthetic manifestos, and prophetic and visionary works. Throughout, we will pay attention to how they approached traditional and experimental literary forms, engaged with visual arts and with music, and developed a theory and practice of literary and everyday language.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL336 Intermediate Poetry Workshop

How does poetry express what, at first, might seem inexpressible? In this project-based workshop, we will explore this question in an attempt to say the unsayable. Guided by immersive writing and reading experiments into language's limits, students will craft a cohesive, project-centered body of poems while cultivating an engaged daily writing practice.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216

ENGL337 Advanced Poetry Workshop

This seminar-style course will focus on the reading and constructive discussion of poetry submitted by members of the workshop. We will explore an extensive reading list of contemporary poetry as well as philosophies of art-making written by both writers and artists. A final book arts project--consisting of 15 pages of revised poetry and a statement of poetic--is due at the end of the semester.

This course may be repeated for credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL337A Advanced Poetry Workshop: Radical Revision

"Poetry," writes Yusef Komunyakaa in his essay collection Blue Notes, "is an act of meditation and improvisation. And need is the motor that propels the words down the silent white space." In this intermediate poetry workshop, students will consider various perspectives on the revision process and explore strategies for redrafting poems-in-progress. While this class is open to any poetry student with previous workshop experience, those who stand to gain the most are those who've already amassed a sizable body of work--poems, drafts, notes--with which they are, for the most part, dissatisfied and eager to improve. It is imperative that students come with an open mind and a willingness to surprise themselves and one another.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216 OR ENGL336 OR ENGL337

ENGL338 Serial Sensations

Regardless of their medium or period, serial texts are often associated with sensationalism. Not only do they frequently feature sensational plots, but by virtue of producing intense fan cultures the texts themselves become public sensations. From "Bleak House" to Marvel comics, and from "Game of Thrones" to the podcast "Serial," serials have produced vibrant if not fanatical fan forums and fan cultures. This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of serial texts ranging from didactic novels to gory and racy ones, and from television shows to podcasts and audio books. Throughout the course of the semester, students will engage in forms of serial reading, listening, and writing, and will discuss the effect of the serial format on plot, characterization, and genre. Moreover, they will examine the ways in which the serial format shapes narrative desire, and the ways in which it molds reading and viewing habits--that is, the mechanisms and logics through which a serial reader, listener, or viewer is produced.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL339 Intermediate Fiction Workshop

This course may be repeated for credit. This workshop is for students who already have a basic understanding of how to write literary fiction, either by having taken an introductory course (e.g., ENGL296 Techniques of Fiction) or by other means. Our task in this fiction workshop will be to expand our writing beyond the simple good vs. bad plot, to a more complex and real understanding of the existence of both in everyone. Students will be encouraged to consider the struggles and conflicts in their own lives, whether they involve personal, global, or community-specific ideals, and blur the lines between "good" and "evil," and even between fiction and nonfiction. We will also look at some of the most pertinent aspects of fiction: plot, place, voice, and character development. We will ask each other: what is it about this story that demanded writing? What is it about these characters that make them unforgettable? What idiosyncratic tendencies does the writer reveal that makes this their story? This class will focus not only on what you create, but how you re-write your work. This class will be centered on revision.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL296 OR ENGL342 OR ENGL224

ENGL339A Intermediate Fiction Workshop: Vernacular

This workshop examines English-based vernaculars from around the world. Students will compose at least two short-stories incorporating the vernacular.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL296

ENGL340 Special Topics: Ecopoetics - Experimental Poetry in the Anthropocene

How do poets speak for and from a world in flux and crisis? How do poets register and attempt to restore the degradation of the planet through language? How might altering the boundaries of conventional language use "through poetry" alter the bounds of conventional thinking and behaving, thus leading to more engaged and sustainable modes of living? This course, in part, will serve as a tour of contemporary eco-poets invested in looking at and caring for the current state of our planet through poetry. We will read poems that reflect the most critical environmental concerns of our time, and we will learn to see how these poems resist closure and are instead guided by exploration and interrogation in an attempt at reorienting our attention and intention as inheritors of this planet.

This is an advanced workshop for students committed to developing an understanding of eco-poetry's place in the more-than-literary world, as well as developing a personal eco-poetics from which to write. Students will choose an environmental topic to research and write in service of for the semester and, by the end of the semester, will have a project-centered collection of poems. There will be bi-weekly presentations on the poetry collections we read, in-class writing experiments, in-the-field experiments, and intensive workshops of participants' work. The class will culminate in an eco-book arts project and a reflective essay.

Special attention will also be given to cultivating community and the benefits of sustaining an embodied artistic practice during extreme times and how doing so may benefit the health of the whole artist.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENVS330
Prereq: (ENGL216 AND ENGL336) OR ENGL337

ENGL341 Archiving America

The guiding questions of this class will be: What is an archive, and how does it shape the production and suppression of knowledge? We will study authors who illustrate the importance of archiving experiences and events across scale, from pandemics to poverty, deportation to day-to-day survival, environmental disaster to the smallest of environmental shifts. Another central issue we will grapple with is the politics of the archive, or how race and empire affect what is considered worthy of archiving and how archival materials are interpreted. Also, to consider archival concepts alongside practice, we will familiarize ourselves with the language and key concepts of archival processes and work with Wesleyan's Special Collections and Archives. Students will have the option of delving into their own materials or the University's archives to undertake projects that illuminate something valuable about the archive.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL342 Advanced Fiction Workshop

This course in short fiction is for people who have already had an introduction to fictional technique and, preferably, an additional course in creative writing. Students will generate and engage in their own writing projects.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL343 The Library: Its Past, Present, and Future

The library is both a repository and a site for disciplining information. It is, at once, a space for democratizing knowledge and a locus of exclusion. A lifeline and a tomb. A place of radicalization and community, but also the handmaiden of state power. Indeed, the library's vexed role in the history of Western colonization has prompted scholars of African and postcolonial literature like Simon Gikandi to ask whether one can be a revolutionary in the library. This question has shaped the archiving sensibilities of African American collectors and librarians like Arthur Schomburg and Dorothy Porter Wesley as well as those of contemporary Black librarians and artists. This will be one of the central questions we explore in this course, too. We will examine artistic and literary representations of libraries, archives, and museums ("The Library of Babel," The Shadow Book, Lote, The Name of the Rose, Voyage of the Sable Venus, Yinka Shonibare's "The British Museum"), paying special attention to the fantasies, nightmares, and cultural narratives that cohere around the idea of the library. We will pay special attention to the place of the library in the Black literary imagination and to the theoretical and political interventions that Black librarians and bibliophiles brought into systems for categorizing and recovering knowledge.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM392, AFAM393
Prereq: None

ENGL344 Women's Lib, Women's Lit

The social movement known as second-wave feminism, but often referred to at the time as "Women's Lib," took center stage in much of the best-selling fiction of the 1970s. This course will look at popular fiction that concerned itself with women's issues and the way it popularized, memorialized, complicated, and contested feminism in the popular imagination. We will look at a range of novels that focused attention on the nature of and possible solutions to women's political, material, and sexual subjection by men. Although our focus will be on the 1970s, we will look at both some important pretexts, and some later responses to the ongoing crises of gendered inequality in the 1980s. We will pay particular attention the gendering of publishing and reception, exploring the contexts in which these books were produced, marketed, reviewed, and read.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: FGSS345
Prereq: None

ENGL345 Plague and Care-Work in Shakespeare's England

Plague exerted an enormous influence on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and indeed on theater as a commercial enterprise. Pandemic theater closures and quarantines were frequent throughout his career, and it is likely that his son Hamnet died of plague. This seminar examines four Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter's Tale) and their preoccupations with time, temporality, belatedness, mortality and ephemerality (of theater and the world-as-stage) and with an ethics and recognition of the work of care, as these are shaped by the recurrence of plague-a perspective that will allow us to draw connections and discern differences between Shakespeare's time and our own.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM348, THEA347
Prereq: None

ENGL346 Utter Nonsense: Modernist Experiments with Meaning

In "The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism" (1933) T.S. Eliot wrote," The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be [...] to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog."

To extend this analogy: this course will look at texts by meatless burglars, writers who set out not to sedate but to conscript the sense-sniffing house-dog as they pillage the house for things of value.

This course will survey some of literary modernism's most defamiliarizing texts, ones that challenge interpreters by withholding or avoiding that digestible (and perhaps soporific) "meaning" Eliot referred to. We will look at modernist formal experiments from Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire through Dada, surrealism, the French New Novel, and the theater of the absurd, alongside the less prominent but equally influential exploration of aleatory, procedural, and machine-generated poetry by writers such as Jackson Mac Low and the Oulipo. Working with authors' manifestos and critics' interpretations alongside the primary texts, we'll pay special attention to the varied relationships to meaning that can be found at work in texts that a casual reader might lump together as simply meaningless or nonsensical.

As the semester progresses and we get a clearer sense of what these texts require from their readers, we'll begin to ask (with the help of some basic readings in semiotic and psychoanalytic literary theory) how our interpretive behavior when confronted with seeming nonsense might relate to the various things we do when we read normal or typical texts--ones that strike us as already or obviously meaningful. Is making sense something that a text can ever do on its own or something that we must always do to (or for) the text?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL338
Prereq: None

ENGL347 Black Grammars

In her text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe argues that Blackness, due its rearrangement of and resistance to hegemonic modes of meaning making, is "anagrammatical." As a concept, anagrammatical Blackness points to "the failure of words and concepts to hold in and on Black flesh." Taking this provocation as a point of departure, this course will consider the relationship between Blackness and the grammatical, with a particular focus on rhetoric and poetics. Each week will focus on a particular rhetorical figure or grammatical concept: subject, metaphor, metonymy, apostrophe, tense, irony, catachresis, parataxis, etc., considering how Blackness shifts our understandings of their operations. Readings will include Ronald Judy, Barbara Johnson, Jacques Derrida, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Fred Moten, and Paul de Man, among others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM347
Prereq: None

ENGL348 Refugee Literature

In this course, we will explore literature by and about refugees to consider what might define the emerging category of "refugee literature." As the official number of refugees continues to climb, the media typically portrays refugees as dependent figures who exist in a state of crisis and emergency and require immediate humanitarian aid. However, tendencies to depict refugees in such terms can obscure the historical and political contexts that cause forced migration and statelessness, as well as overshadow the perspectives of refugees. We will study the complexity of refugee voices while also situating texts historically and alongside theories of forced displacement and human rights. While the course is literature-based, we will also deal more broadly with narrative and consider how refugee narratives might serve as a premise for engaging broader rubrics of American culture and history. This course has a service-learning component through which we will extend what we learn in the classroom by working with refugees affiliated with a local organization.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL349 Historicizing Early Modern Sexualities

This course will examine recent historical and theoretical approaches to the history of sexuality in early modern English literature (ca. 1580-1680). Our focus will be the historical construction of sexuality in relation to categories of gender, race, religion, and social status in a variety of sources, both literary and nonliterary, verbal and visual, including poetry, plays, masques, medical treatises, travel narratives, and visual media. Topics covered include intersecting constructions of the sexed/gendered/racialized body; diverse sexual practices; sexual identities prior to the homo/hetero divide; and the histories of pornography and masturbation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: FGSS350, CHUM345
Prereq: ENGL201

ENGL350 The Law, the Citizen, and the Literary and Cinematic Imaginations

In this course, we will study several major legal events that highlight the contradictions and injustices in the history of U.S. citizenship and the ways this history has been reimagined in literature and cinema. Among the topics discussed will be the slave codes, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Jim Crow order, the Bracero program, sodomy laws, and SB 1070. We will consider theories of citizen, state, race, and sexuality implicit in these legal structures, with an eye for who may be incorporated into the body politic and who is unassimilable by design, and on what terms. In addition, we will consider the way literary and cinematic texts engage the rhetoric and psychic effects of the law and the way they present different imaginaries of human bodies, communities, and temporalities. Our focus will be on African American, African diasporic, Latina/o/x and Indigenous literatures and cinemas, as they reveal the rifts and conjunctions among the categories citizen, "savage," "gente sin razón," slave, illegal, pervert, and deviant.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST350, AFAM350
Prereq: None

ENGL351 Aesthetics and/or Ideology

An introduction to prominent works of aesthetic theory and to their influence on Anglo-American literary theory and literary expression.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL352 Flaunting: Extreme Fashion on the Early Modern Stage

Frilly ruffs and cuffs, bulging codpieces, towering "chopines" (platform shoes)--oh my! This course considers the early modern stage as an engine of fashion and the forms of sartorial ostentation to which it gave rise. How did fashion contribute the rise of the commercial theater? How did clothing shape gender, sexuality, class and race in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which were performed by adult men and gender-fluid, "boy" actors? How did sartorial excess and the sumptuary laws that sought to control it affect social status and mobility during the rise of capitalism? And how were early modern fashion trends updated in later productions of these plays?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM301
Prereq: None

ENGL353 Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Medieval Literature

Why do white supremacists celebrate the European Middle Ages as a lost era of racial and religious purity? This course approaches that question by considering the emergence of medieval ideas of race, ethnicity, and religious difference. We will also think through the meaning of these categories in medieval studies. Our focus will be on a selection of texts dealing with encounters--real and imaginary--of Western European Christians with cultures from the Mongol Empire to the Jewish communities in their own territories. The readings will begin historically with the Crusades and the gruesome chronicles written by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authors. We will move on to religious polemics, travel accounts, and romances: fictions that re-imagine the past in terms of exoticized sexuality, racial transformation, cannibalism, and nationalist fantasy.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: MDST353, CJST353
Prereq: None

ENGL354 Why Literary History?

Why should poems, novels and plays written centuries ago engage our attention? Why should we care? And how have answers to these questions themselves changed over the course of literary history? We will dwell, in particular, on two key historical turning points: eighteenth-century Britain, when influential canonizing projects in print worked to define a native "English" tradition at the same time as the country pursued imperial expansion, and mid-twentieth-century America, when New Criticism institutionalized certain modes of reading historical literature just as English as a discipline was taking something like its modern shape. And, of course, we will grapple with the purposes, the pleasures, and the possibilities of literary history now. Throughout, we will also be attending to the practical work of doing literary history - students will work in Special Collections to produce their own edition of a historical text.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM317
Prereq: None

ENGL356 Theories of Translation

This course will examine a range of predominately 20th-century theoretical approaches to literary translation in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism, and translation studies. In an effort to derive a definition of literary translation, we will focus on two questions. First: What is literal (or word-for-word) translation? How does it differ from other kinds of translation; how does it conceptualize meaning; what are its purposes; and what oppositions (e.g., literal vs. figurative) can we use to make sense of it? Second: What is the relationship between language and culture? Can translation give us access to an unfamiliar culture; can literary translation affect the culture in which it is produced; or does translation simply colonize foreign texts by transforming them into something legible to a domestic culture?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL336
Prereq: None

ENGL357 Black Texts, Lost and Found

This course examines histories of loss and recovery of black texts in the US and the Atlantic world more broadly. We will bring a three-pronged approach to our subject matter. We will analyze first the constitutive silences of the archive: epistemic and material neglect, or what Michel Trouillot has termed the "silencing of the past"; second, the preservation efforts of black newspaper editors, librarians, and bibliophiles; and third, the "counter-archiving" work of Afro-diasporic historical and speculative fiction. As we traverse different periods and empires we will consider what the concepts of the "black archive" and "black ephemera" mean to different disciplines. We will study the repressions of black Arabic writing practices in the US South and our fragmentary recovery of them in the late 20th century, unfinished novels about Black Atlantic revolutions such as Martin Delany's "Blake," incomplete runs of historic black newspapers, debates about the illusions and desires of "recovery," and the criteria that determine what counts as ephemeral and when.

We will move across different media, from print--"I, Tituba," "M Archive," "Blake," "(Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular"--to films--"The Watermelon Woman," "Looking for Langston," "The Last Angel of History"--and from digitized databases of photographs at the ongoing archiving project The Missing Chapter: Black Chronicles to digitized newspaper archives.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM336, AFAM336
Prereq: None

ENGL358 Writing the War on Terror: Crafting Literary Responses to Fiction, Film, and Television after 9/11

In this interdisciplinary, mixed-genre writing seminar, students will create works of creative non-fiction--book and film reviews, op-ed pieces, and memoirs--and short fictional pieces as they explore the ways contemporary literature and film have depicted the post-9/11 War on Terror. They will watch documentaries by Laura Poitras, as well as Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. They will read fiction by Mohsin Hamid, Elina Hirvonen, Deborah Eisenberg, and Martin Amis, and nonfiction prose by Dunya Mikhail, Pankaj Mishra, and George Packer. There will be a significant workshop component to this course. Students will focus on presenting their ideas in sophisticated, accessible prose, paying close attention to language, style, and syntax at the line and paragraph levels.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL292 OR ENGL296

ENGL359 Criticism and Marxism

This course introduces students to the Marxist (or historical-materialist) tradition, with an accent on its centrality to interpretative methods in literary studies and to related fields in the human sciences. We will study foundations, beginning with Marx and Engels, and our reading will carry us through the range of Marxisms that inform contemporary critical practice. We will focus on historical materialism as a style of dialectical thought, uniquely equipped to grasp both our immediate objects of study (literary texts and other cultural productions) and the social forces through which those objects are determined. In the same dialectical mode, we will reflect often on the relation between our work in the classroom and our contemporary social and historical situation. Students with an interest in literary and social theory will benefit from the course, as will students who know a little bit about Marxism but want to understand the logic of this crucial body of thought.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: GRST259
Prereq: None

ENGL360 Special Topics: Writing Lives

In this course, students will read profiles, biographies, and theories of biography, texts that focus on the stakes of writing the lives of women, people of color, people with disabilities, and queer subjects. As we analyze these attempts to capture a life, to define the problems of this form, and to expand its possibilities, students will work on their own biographical writing. Throughout the semester, we will ask: Whose lives get written, and by whom? What constitutes evidence of a life, according to whom--and what gets left out? What kinds of research are necessary? How does a writer's relationship to her subject inform such a portrait, and what are the ethics of that relationship?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: FGSS360
Prereq: None

ENGL361 After Orientalism: Asian American Literature and Theory After 2000

From early articulations of cultural nationalist pride to today's transnational, intersectional, deconstructive, feminist, and queer critiques, Asian American studies is a field that has radically expanded and transformed since its original emergence out of the Third World and student strikes of the late 1960s. This course seeks to take the temperature of Asian America today by exploring a range of contemporary works published after the millennium, more than 30 years after the field's inception. Alongside a selection of novels, poetry, short stories, and graphic novels by some of the most acclaimed contemporary writers in America, we will also consider critical and theoretical texts that offer different perspectives on our contemporary historical moment, exploring frameworks of modernity, postmodernity, neoliberalism, and the university as ways of situating contemporary Asian America's aesthetic innovations. Though not required, it is strongly recommended that students have taken ENGL230 Introduction to Asian American Literature or a comparable substitute prior to enrolling.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST313
Prereq: None

ENGL362 Friendship and Collaboration: In Theory, In Practice

How do we conceive of friendship, collaboration, love, and collectivity? In an interview, Michel Foucault stated that the relational task of the homosexual was to "invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure." This course considers theories and performances of relationality, queer belonging, and friendship with an emphasis on forms of belonging and recognition that exceed normative protocols. We will ask how queer practices, Black thought, and Indigenous epistemologies inform our own imaginings of collaborative projects. Beginning with philosophical determinations of friendship, we will branch out to imagine ways in which artists, lovers, friends, and/or co-habitators enact togetherness. This class will focus on theoretical readings and creative exercises and will culminate in a collaborative project.

This counts as an Expanded Field of Theater course for the Theater Major.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA364
Prereq: None

ENGL363 Visualizing Black Remains

This advanced seminar engages African Diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (visual art, performance, film, literature) that grapple with the appetite, effects, and stakes of representing Black remains. What does this visual reproduction make possible or obscure, and what is its relationship to violence? The class will also encourage students to think about the ethics of reparation/repatriation in relation to forms of loss and dispossession that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor visually evidenced (in conventional ways). In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, objecthood, violence, empathy, and reparation?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM362, AFAM363, ANTH362, FGSS362, THEA362
Prereq: None

ENGL364 Destroying the Audience: Limits of Performance and Representation in the Theater of (Non) Being

Young Jean Lee's Theatre Company, active between 2003 and 2016, is most known for a series of "racial-identity plays," written and directed by Lee, which adopt an experimental approach to the critique of racial politics, driven by the motto "destroy the audience." On the one hand, this course will explore literary and artistic works that express an ambivalent, if not antagonistic, relationship to the presence of an audience. On the other hand, this course will consider the role and function of the audience as a social category by considering how the concept of audience (broadly understood) contributes to cultural production about race and gender as a potentially active element in the creative process. Students can expect to read and/or view drama, visual art, performance, film, and self-writing (autobiography and memoir) which, explicitly or implicitly, address the presence of the audience as a way of tackling larger social and cultural problems related to race and ethnicity. The goal will be to foster an understanding of the politics of gender, sexuality, ability, language, and class that determine how these issues are conceptualized and articulated. This course will employ an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of primary and secondary texts, engaging audience studies, performance studies, ethnic studies, and disability studies, in addition to queer/trans of color, postcolonial, and legal theory, to historically contextualize and theoretically ground a cultural understanding of the relation between audience and racial performance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS353, THEA353, AMST354
Prereq: None

ENGL365 Ethics and Literature

P.B. Shelley's claim that "the great instrument of moral good is the imagination" lacks the twentieth-century pessimism of his inheritor, W.H. Auden, who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Beginning from this disagreement about the influence of creative work on social and material relations, this course explores the ethical effects of aesthetic production. Drawing on a historically broad set of readings, from the Enlightenment and Romantic period through the twenty-first century, we will look at how writers and philosophers address the relationship between literature and moral transformation. These works help us examine Wittgenstein's assertion that "words are also deeds."
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL366 Dangerous Realisms

The aim of this course is to explore realism's ideological possibilities, past and present. We will begin with an introduction to realism as the preeminent formal technique for narrating novels and proceed by looking at other genres that either adapt, or respond to, realist writing. Readings will be drawn from 19th-century Europe and 20th-century Africa and will include works of realism, naturalism, and modernism. These will be considered alongside theories of realism and the novel. Theorists may include Aristotle, Armstrong, Barthes, Hartman, Jameson, Lukács, and Watt. We will read novels by Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Miguel de Cervantes, J.M. Coetzee, Daniel Defoe, and Gustave Flaubert.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM372
Prereq: None

ENGL367 Nature Description: Literature and Theory

What happens to the world when we describe it using language? What happens to language? How much can we really know about nature as it is, in itself, outside of our representational strategies? In what ways do different kinds of description--and the often unexamined assumptions that structure them--limit what we can see? Do different modes of description and figurative language do different things to the world? And what do they do *in* the world--what ideological or political work? How, in short, does language reflect, touch, and transform the material world?

This course will grapple with big questions about nature, language, race, class, history, science, literary form, and human minds, as well as the complex interactions between and among these. We will seek answers by attending closely to literary, scientific, and theoretical texts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: STS365
Prereq: None

ENGL368 Faulkner and the Thirties

An investigation of Faulkner's work and career in the context of American literature and politics of the thirties.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL369 Performance Remains: Slavery in the Black Dramatic Imagination

As sociologist Orlando Patterson notes, "In the absence of historical records, one way to explore the inner lives of slaves is to exercise one's literary imagination" (Slavery and Social Death, 2018). Taking direction from Patterson, this course is interested in mining the literary imagination of contemporary Black playwrights who are interested in recovering, reconstructing, rewriting, repairing and, in some cases, revolting against the fragmented and muted histories of the African slave trade and the lost experiences of the Black lives therein. From Aimé Césaire's A Tempest (1969), a bold postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest, to Winsome Pinnock's Rockets and Blue Lights (2020), an examination of British history inspired by two 19th-century paintings by the English romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, our plays originate from the Caribbean, England, and the United States. As African diasporic texts, these plays are exercises in the dramatic power of Sankofa, a principle derived from the Akan people of Ghana, meaning that the plays become the vessels through which audiences, readers, and characters return to the past in order to better understand and move forward in the present. We will engage in a thorough exploration of form, region, dialect, adaptation, and aesthetics, among other aspects, as we align lost and documented histories with dramatic conjuring.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM369, THEA369
Prereq: None

ENGL370 The Novel as History

Ever since the historical novel's appearance in the early 19th century, the genre has flourished as a way to describe and invent the past. But historical novels tend to narrate history differently than traditional historiography, supplementing historical records, attending to overlooked psychic and material experiences, reimagining past lives and events to do work in the present. This course will examine the historical novel to explore how its formal strategies amend or improve upon conventional modes of writing history. Each week we will read historical novels paired with theoretical readings. Together this will allow us to think about how fiction might be uniquely positioned to address a range of topics including, but surely exceeding: memory, utopia, nationalism, romance, trauma, commemoration, objectivity, war, archives, realism, speculation, and the everyday.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL371 Sister Acts: Black Feminist/Womanist Theater of the African Diaspora

This course surveys the dynamism and scope of contemporary feminist/womanist drama written by black women playwrights of the African Diaspora. Reading select plays from Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, England, and the United States, alongside theory and criticism, we examine the impact of race, gender, identity, and sexuality politics on black feminist/womanist theater. Throughout our study of these dramatic texts, their performances, and their subsequent critiques, we are equally invested in the bridges and the gaps, the audibles and the silences, and the overlaps and the divides, as they are formed. Significantly, this analytic undertaking involves a simultaneous critique of the role of the playwright, the spectator, and the critic of black feminist/womanist theater. At all times, consideration is given to the ways in which these playwrights collectively use theater as a platform to explore black and female and diasporic subjectivities across regional, national, and, at times, linguistic differences.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: FGSS371, THEA371, AFAM371
Prereq: None

ENGL372 Special Topics: Poets in Translation

In this craft seminar, students will read texts on the challenges of translation, then dive into the close readings of poems in various translations. What inclinations might we observe of poets of different regions and times, which break the customary "rules" of the American workshop poem? What new possibilities might we glimpse--and "translate" into our own work? In turn, we will read contemporary poets who exercise their own form of translation out of the English language elsewhere. Students will be invited to translate poems into English, as well as experiment with the techniques they have observed in poems in translation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL373 From Courtly Love to Cannibalism: Medieval Romances

Romance is the narrative form of medieval sexualities and courtly love, but it also gives literary shape to social worlds in which a protagonist switches genders, skin color changes with religion, and a dog might be the hero of a narrative. In this course, we will begin with texts that date from the Romance's origins in 12th-century France and continue with the form's development up to the well-known Middle English texts of the 14th century, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight set at King Arthur's court. Some of the topics we will consider are Romance's engagement with "chivalry," the religious and racial conflicts of the Crusades, and of course, Christian mysticism and the Holy Grail.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: MDST373
Prereq: None

ENGL374 Literature in the Age of Social Media

What does it mean to write, and to read, when the predominant form of self-expression for many of us resides in social media? What does it mean to construct a digital self, separate and apart from the selves that exist IRL? To interact primarily through the mediation of screens? In what ways do we commodify ourselves, and are we commodified? What risks do we run in revealing our inner most thoughts and feelings in an age of autocratic and capitalist surveillance, in which algorithms direct the attention once guided by more organic social forces? And how do all these issues affect the core mission of literature, which is to tell stories that reflect both the public self and the private one? We'll examine all these questions through a collection of texts, ranging from novels (Megha Majumdar's A Burning, Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, Tao Lin's Taipei), essays (Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, Samantha Irby's wow, no thank you), and poems (Emily Berry's "Paris," Tommy Pico's "Junk"). We'll also consider these questions through some short writing assignments that ask students to engage in the creative act through the lens of social media.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT350
Prereq: None

ENGL375 Black Global Cities

In this course, we will analyze representations of cities and Black urban modernity in Afro- diasporic literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Placing special emphasis on the global hubs of London, Cape Town, Kinshasa Lagos, New York, Marseilles, and Kingston, we will ask what makes these former imperial sites Black global cities? We will read literary works on and from Black Global Cities alongside sociological texts on urbanization, globalization and discuss the extent to which literary representations either collude with or challenge dominant national and transnational narratives about Black urban modernity. Although each week's readings will focus on a different location, we will approach these locales as nodes in larger global networks of people, texts, and goods rather than as discreet, bounded places. To this end, we will trace how histories of racial formation move across borders and are transposed onto different spaces, and to what effect. Authors we will read include: Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Gabeba Baderoon, Petina Gappah, Kei Miller, and Teju Cole. We will also watch films such as Girlhood (2014), Black Panther (2018), The Harder They Come (1972), Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens (2011), Welcome to Nollywood (2007).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM375, AMST375
Prereq: None

ENGL376 Negativity in Black Critical Thought

Lack, nothingness, negation, the void, the abyssal, absence, wretchedness these and other corollary terms are omnipresent grammars within Black critical thought's attempts to explicate the singularity of Blackness. Conversant with philosophical genealogies of pessimism, nihilism, and negativity, this course will examine various theorizations of the relationship between Blackness and the negative. Rather than framing negativity as essentially apolitical or unproductive, this course will consider what a fidelity to the negative portends for questions of Black politics, Black theorizing, and revolutionary action. In so doing we will pay particular attention to questions of affect, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and psycho-politics.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AFAM372
Prereq: None

ENGL377 Shakespeare's Islands

How did England's insularity and expansionist ambitions on the world's stage shape Shakespearean dramaturgy in his many plays with island settings? This course, taught in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities' spring 2022 theme of "Islands as Metaphor and Method" considers how Shakespeare's island locales (e.g., in ancient and medieval Britain, the Mediterranean, and the Americas) transformed the Globe theater into a physical and conceptual site for imagining the utopian and dystopian potential of early English nation-building and colonial expansion, and for exploring the poetics of relation and alterity, peripherality and centrality, archaism and futurity. In addition to studying the play-texts themselves, we will consider how their island settings are explored in subsequent theatrical and film productions and adaptations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM364, THEA346
Prereq: None

ENGL378 Creative Writing, Post-Modernism, and Future Theories

Two main lines of inquiry will guide this class. First, what historically has been the place of creative writing workshops and the products they have galvanized? Second, how has post-modernism been defined in the past and how is it defined now? With various strategies and daily practice alongside long-term goals, we will think and write to create assemblages of compositions that go beyond traditional expectations, and potential exhaustion with generic form, towards renewed inspiration and commitments.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM395
Prereq: None

ENGL379 Special Topic: Writing the Sonnet

The sonnet is one of our oldest and most ubiquitous poetic forms. For centuries, writers as disparate as William Shakespeare, Marilyn Nelson, Wanda Coleman, and David Wojahn have dabbled, innovated, succeeded, and sometimes failed with the form. In this course, we will explore the demands and nuances of the sonnet, in an effort to discover what has attracted and continues to attract so many practitioners. By semester's end, students will possess greater facility with the form itself, as well as skills and techniques that may be of use when composing future poems, whether formal or free-verse.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216 OR ENGL336

ENGL380 Special Topics: Prosody and Poetic Forms

In this course, we will study various forms--received and organic, traditional and non--from the inside out. We will also explore the uses and effects of metered verse. By the end of the semester, students will possess both a historical and applied understanding of prosody and of each form covered. More importantly, they'll know why, when, and how some conventions and techniques work better than others, and will be able to apply what they've learned to their own poems, formal or otherwise.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216

ENGL381 The Gothic and the Sentimental

The gothic and the sentimental are hallmarks of modern literary imagination. Since the late 18th century, storytellers have returned time and again to tales of obsession and horror and to narratives of emotional affiliation, continually reinventing the trappings of the genres while seeming nevertheless to preserve their core concerns. Why did these two imaginative modes spring up contemporaneously, and why have they proven to be so durable? In this course we will examine classic texts in the gothic and sentimental traditions while reading them alongside influential theoretical texts that seek to explain the force of their preoccupations. Students will evaluate a range of critical approaches and develop a research project examining a contemporary example of gothic and/or sentimental narrative.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL382 Reading Between Freedom and Necessity

Mostly the culture of literacy has taken shape within a realm of freedom, seemingly distant from the needs of the body and the demands of sustenance. At the same time, the world represented within so much of the world's narratives, both truth and fiction, has been saturated in struggle and deprivation. In this seminar we will try to make some sense of this juxtaposition, freedom on one side and necessity on the other, to explore the flip side of the drama of revolution in modern times. For us, revolutions, those great upheavals that unite hope with practical action, will be the background against which we will try to understand the gravity and persistence of dispossession itself: the pull of past or residual forms of unfreedom in the sphere of cultural representation, within and against new or emerging expressions of emancipation, themselves accompanied or countered in modern times by ever-novel styles of exploitation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: CHUM383
Prereq: None

ENGL383 Fascism and American Literature

American writers were deeply engaged by the rise of 20th-century European fascism. A number of American writers took part in a generational critique of liberal democracy and thus played a role in establishing the intellectual context for the success of fascist ideology. Some American writers were fascinated by the seeming dynamism and innovation of fascist regimes. Others recognized early on the rising threat of authoritarianism and militant nationalism. In the years after World War II, many American writers surveyed the wreckage of global war and the consequences of genocidal racism and worried about their significance for art and literary expression. Were literary writers meaningfully complicit in the rise of fascism? Had totalitarianism discredited literature and culture? Or could art be a challenge to the forces that drove the rise of fascism? This research seminar will examine a range of ways in which American writers responded to fascism. We will consult the historiography and theory of fascism, as well as scholarship in the sociology of culture, with the aim of understanding how the rise of fascism affected American writers' fundamental beliefs about literature, democracy, and modern society.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL384 Special Topic: Between Forms: Intermedia Arts Workshop

This advanced project-based workshop is for poets and artists interested in interdisciplinary practices crossing over between poetry, visual art, and performance. It is taught in conversation with the Fall 2021 exhibition, The Language in Common, in Zilkha Gallery including the work of Cecilia Vicuña, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Julien Creuzet, Jasper Marsalis, and Alice Notley.

Facilitated by Professors Benjamin Chaffee and Danielle Vogel, with modules taught by visiting artists from across the arts, this workshop is designed for students interested in working outside of--or between--their primary mediums. Professors will guide students as they choose "companion mediums" to work in for the semester while employing interdisciplinary approaches to writing and art-making in order to discover their own unique and hybrid forms.

We will divide our time between intensive laboratory-like spaces for composing work, conversations with visiting artists, student presentations and workshops, and studying the works of artists working between forms, all in an attempt to root ourselves more dynamically in our individual practices. The course will culminate in a reflective essay or artist statement, as well as an exhibit of poems, objects, installations, and performances created during our time together.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ARST384
Prereq: None

ENGL385 Staging Blackness: African American Theater

This course surveys the dynamism and scope of African American dramatic and performance traditions. We begin with a deep historical examination of 19th century blackface minstrelsy that then progresses into a long-view of how black American dramatists and theater-makers have self-fashioned black dramatic narratives, black aesthetics, and black representations into the twenty-first century. In all cases, we are interested in surveying the ways in which these artists work within varying modes of dramatic expression and focus their plays and performances on such topics as class, ethnicity, era, fragmentation, gender, history, region, revolution, nationality, race, sexuality, and spectatorship.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: THEA323, AFAM323, FGSS323
Prereq: None

ENGL386 Special Topics: Improvisation--Collaborating with the Unknown

To improvise is to compose as one goes along, to arrange the unexpected, to make work from whatever materials and sources are at hand without previous planning. In this course, students will cultivate their relationships with what lies outside their realm of knowledge or experience in order to invent unforeseen but dynamic written works. We will study contemporary practitioners (e.g., poets, composers, essayists, dancers, and visual artists), who use found materials, somatic experiments, creative acts of translation, divination, and other innovative modes of improvisation to generate work. Together, while always keeping language close, we will create a forum in which bewilderment guides us. The class will culminate in an installation of creative writing projects spanning fields.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL292 OR ENGL296 OR ENGL216

ENGL387 Literature of London

This course examines the role of London in the literary imagination of nineteenth-century Britain. A vibrant multi-class and multi-ethnic jigsaw puzzle, London was a "world city" at the center of the empire, the seat of crown and Parliament, and a place of both danger and opportunity. In addition to being the economic and political center of Great Britain, some authors viewed London as the nation's narrative center as well. Together, we will explore how writers depicted the city, how they envisioned the relationship between urban living and modern life, how they understood London's inhabitants and their plots, and how they placed the city in networks of stories reaching around the world. Along the way, we will read works of literary and social theory from the nineteenth century to the present, and we will conduct our own investigations. Students will choose whether to undertake a single project culminating in a long research paper (fulfilling the requirement for honors thesis writers) or a combination of papers and targeted research projects, which may have a creative component.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL388 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: The Literature of the American 1960s

This workshop course will give students experience in writing for public audiences about literary and social history, along with practice in editing and collaborating to produce effective prose. Our focus will be on the literary and social history of the 1960s in the U.S. Each student will select an author or publication to research and report on and will work collaboratively with classmates to sharpen his or her writing. Featured genres in which students will practice will include: book review, interview, profile, memoir and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL389 Blackness and Affect

Critical theory and the humanities are in the throes of what has been termed "the affective turn," wherein scholars theorize affect--broadly construed as social feeling or bodily intensity--as central to understanding (post/human) relationality, the social, ethics, and the political. Haunting this field of inquiry is a series of questions: Can a turn to affect account for the figure of the Slave? Can an embrace of affectivity, as potential, bring Blackness into the realm of our understanding "without trying to fill in the void" (Hartman)? Rather than conceptualizing affect as the connective thread between bodies and worlds, or as a purely relational force, how might we think about affect and non-relationality; affect outside of and against the world; affect without the body? This seminar will engage these, and related, questions through extended explorations of the relationship between affect theory and Blackness. Readings will include: Frantz Fanon, Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, Rizvana Bradley, Xine Yao, Sianne Ngai, and Darieck Scott, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM335, AFAM325
Prereq: None

ENGL390 Special Topics: Generative Novel Workshop

In this course, students will study contemporary novels, including the work of Toni Morrison, Julie Otsuka, Namwali Serpell and Kazuo Ishiguro with an eye for what differentiates the craft of writing a novel from that of writing a short story. Students then will conceptualize, explore, and write a substantial portion of a new novel project in class. They will submit outlines and excerpts for peer critique and participate in workshopping their peers' writing. The focus of this course will be generative rather than critical; that is, we aim to formulate questions, spark inspiration, and create momentum for a new novel project, rather than seek answers or completeness.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL296 AND ENGL339 AND ENGL342

ENGL391 Unsovereign Elements, Caribbean Poetics

This course aims to study and question sovereignty, begin to theorize "unsovereignty," and stake out what may be meant by "anticolonial imagination" in literary and other aesthetic forms, as well in the theories of history that it arranges under its name, "Unsovereign, Caribbean." Unsovereignty and the anticolonial will not be imagined as exact and liberated opposites of sovereignty and colonialism, but rather as epistemically and linguistically entangled therewith, and inviting further thought from Afro-Caribbean historical and deconstructive vantages. By reading richly symptomatic, primary, historical documents about race, geography, and slavery in San Domingue/Santo Domingo, as well as contemporary fiction, art, and criticism that re-narrate and theorize Caribbean history, we will focus on the historical frame of ~1492 into the 19th century. This frame holds with specific reference to Sara E. Johnson's notion of a foundational "state of war" against black people in the Americas and Frank B. Wilderson III's notion of when the "gratuitous violence" of the Middle Ages begins "to mark the Black ontologically." The 19th century will be studied comparatively, and not as the era of heralded "emancipation," but of abduction, re-enslavement, "travestied freedom" (Hartman), anti-emancipation (Eller), and white psychosis. We will read sometimes for imperial notions of sovereignty, force, race, property, and labor, and other times for Caribbean notions and narratives that are sometimes at war with and sometimes in bed with said imperial schema and this episteme. In the face of some contemporary critical theoretical tendencies to use terms like "fugitivity," "resistance," "freedom," "abolition," "the commons," etc., as ones that are equally at stake for all, or that signify one shared known, fixed, and agreed-upon meaning, we will, rather (and especially), attend to the historical specificity and signifying work of marronage in the Caribbean region and the complex tropology of unsovereignty and "unruliness" in the Caribbean. Conceptually, the course thinks from and about Caribbean studies, Black critical theory, Black studies, Enlightenment thought, and Deconstruction. Students who want to nerd-out on critical theory, history, and Caribbean aesthetics are encouraged to apply.

We will study digitized versions of imperial naval and commercial maps held at the John Carter Brown Library, Archivo de Indias, and in other archives, as well as primary texts of different genres (e.g., pilotes, ledgers, letters, legal documents), including the writing and thinking of Christopher Columbus, Moreau de Saint Mery, Baudry des Lozieres, María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel. We will also read selections from some of the following scholars, artists, writers: Colin Dayan, Sara E. Johnson, Evelynne Trouillot, Jacques Derrida, Robin Derby, Maryse Conde, Alejo Carpentier, Demetrius Eudell, Anne Eller, Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo, Ronald Mendoza de Jesús, Frank Wilderson III, Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, Aimé Césaire, Beatriz Santiago Munoz, Joiri Minaya, Jean Rhys, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM391, AMST381, AFAM391
Prereq: None

ENGL392 Topics in the Early Modern Lyric: Metaphor

This course involves studies in the practice and theory of metaphor in 16th- and 17th-century lyric poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Drayton, Daniel, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL393 Special Topic: Difficult Novels, Uneasy Narratives

How have writers learned to accommodate histories and experiences that feel too overwhelming to describe? How have the techniques of fiction and nonfiction helped to construct narratives that take into account the incoherence and confusion of political and personal events? In this class, we will be reading challenging works that seek to embrace complexity. We will be asking ourselves how novels, plays, and nonfiction can both verbalize and quiet some of the questions we have all been asking as one inevitable occurrence seems to lead to the next. In this class, you will be thoroughly immersed in literary exchanges. You will be asked to reckon with the questions that spring from each literary work, and to set several books in conversation with each other to see what surprising, new dialogue emerges. This is a class deeply engaged in the ideas that spring from your own interpretations and considerations of what you read.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL292 OR ENGL296 OR ENGL339 OR ENGL342 OR ENGL325 OR ENGL326

ENGL394 Special Topics: Writing the Poetic Sequence

In this special topics seminar, students will continue to hone their creative and critical skills while focusing on the joys, opportunities, and challenges of crafting the long poetic sequence. Throughout the semester, students will write, revise, and workshop their own drafts-in-progress, and will study some of the greatest sequences written in the language. Poets and artists under consideration include Francis Bacon, Black Thought, Erykah Badu, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, John Coltrane, T.S. Eliot, Ross Gay, Allen Ginsberg, Aracelis Girmay, Robert Hayden, Major Jackson, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Layli Long Soldier, Adrienne Rich, Nicole Sealey, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, and Walt Whitman.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216

ENGL395 Hell: An Introduction

An inquiry into the changing experience of damnation, from sin to despair, in Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost. Both are epics, poems of history, but their notions of history and of its lessons, belong to the specific historical moments of their composition. Both struggle, as Milton puts it, "To justify the works of God to man" but in different ways: Dante, through a representation of how hell represents divine justice as an expression of divine love: his sinners are not so punished for their sins as by them. Their torments are representations of the false good they pursue in their sins. They pursue damnation. For Milton, as for Shakespeare, original sin is not so much pride, an inborn sense of superiority, as ambition, an inborn sense of lack and intolerable sense of inadequacy that can be dispelled only by equaling the "most high," even if it means to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

ENGL396 Thinking with Objects: Processing a Museum Collection from Southern Africa

In Thinking with Objects, students will gain hands-on experience processing a collection of Namibian artifacts in Wesleyan's care. The course will introduce students to many of the ethical and practical challenges facing museum collections today, providing an opportunity to apply the ideas we discuss all semester by processing a collection of decorative and everyday objects made from diverse materials (wood, beads, animal hide, and shells). Part of the course will be the investigation of the origins and function of these objects. Learning how to handle, label, store, and potentially exhibit objects from the collection will enable students to reflect on Wesleyan's relationship to the African continent, and to think more generally about university and museum collections and methodologies
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST364
Prereq: None

ENGL399 Advanced Playwriting: Long Form

This is an immersive workshop for students working at a rigorous, committed level of playwriting. We will focus on long form as students begin, develop, and rewrite full-length plays, challenging themselves to expand their technique as they articulate their creative vision.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA399
Prereq: [THEA199 or ENGL269]

ENGL401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ENGL407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ENGL408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ENGL409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL419 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

ENGL420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

ENGL420A Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U

ENGL420B Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U

ENGL450 Senior Seminar in Creative Writing

This course is for seniors interested in the chance to devote more time to their creative writing. Structured as a space for workshop and exchange, the goal of this class will be to foster a community of ideas for students working on their own, independently directed creative writing projects. Our concerns and topics will be generated as a group with an eye toward flexibility with commitments. In part we will be exploring what it might mean to be a writer beyond the classroom. A spirit of generosity and adventure will be expected. We will be open to considering work in all its stages, and participants will have a part in setting readings to introduce issues and supplement concerns pertinent to ongoing writing, as we embark from inspirations to questions of generating goals, both as a group of writers and as individual artists.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: ENGL216 OR ENGL292 OR ENGL296 OR ENGL325 OR ENGL336 OR ENGL339 OR ENGL326 OR ENGL337 OR ENGL342

ENGL465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

ENGL467 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

ENGL470 Independent Study, Undergraduate

ENGL491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL496 Research Apprentice, Undergraduate

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

ENGL501 Individual Tutorial, Graduate

Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ENGL502 Individual Tutorial, Graduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

2024-2025 Edition

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