English CTLL. “Telling and Retelling”: Reshaping and Remixing Myths and Fairy Tales

Instructor: Nick White
Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: 2 Arrow St 420
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course site

In this workshop, we will study how writers have taken classic stories (fairy tales, Greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s plays, epic poetry, parables from sacred texts) and retold them with a contemporary sensibility. In the first half of the semester, we will closely read exemplary short stories and novels by writers such as Angela Carter, Emma Donoghue, John Gardner, Helen Oyeyemi, and Kamila Shamsie. In the second half of the semester, we will workshop your own retellings: you will submit one flash piece and one longer story (around 5,000 words) to be workshopped. The final project will be a significant revision of the longer story. 

Supplemental Application Information:Prior experience writing fiction is helpful but not required. Please submit a writing sample of 3-5 pages of fiction, along with an application letter explaining your interest in this course, any writing experience you feel is relevant, and listing examples of work that moves and/or influences you, explaining why it does.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, August 21)

English CVLI. Imagination Under Siege: Creativity in Times of Crisis

Instructor: Valeria Luiselli
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Lamont Library 401
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students

What happens to our imagination and capacity for creativity during crises? Do circumstances like wars, authoritarianism, exile or confinement ignite or stifle our creative drive? What roles do fear and isolation play in our creative lives? What is the relationship between imagination, memory and will? Is imagination an instrument or an end in itself? These are some of the questions that will be addressed during this workshop.

Students will write brief weekly responses to readings, and work on fragmentary and hybrid forms of prose and/or sonic essays, in search of new ways of exploring imagination as both a tool for creative resistance and as an end in itself. We will be engaging with work by: Audre Lorde, Plato, Natalie Díaz, María Zambrano, José Limón, Joseph Brodsky, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Borges, Daniil Kharms, and Yásnaya Elena Aguilar, among others.

Supplemental Application Information: Admission by application only. For information on specific application requirements and instructions, please see the full course listing on the English Department website. DEADLINE: for all Fall 2022 workshops, applications will open TBA and are due via Submittable by 11:59pm EDT on TBA. Students will be notified of admissions decisions by 4:00pm EDT on TBA. Workshops will meet the first week of classes.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, August 21)... Read more about English CVLI. Imagination Under Siege: Creativity in Times of Crisis

Freshman Seminar 64p. Introduction to Lyric Poetry

Instructor: Gordon Teskey
Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 316
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

This is a seminar for first-year students that introduces lyric poetry from Asia, Europe, and North America. The seminar covers a wide range of time as well as place. We travel from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Italy and France, from classical China, Japan, and Persia to Renaissance Europe, from the Romantic period in England, Germany, and France to contemporary America.

All poems not in English—in Greek, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Anglo Saxon, Italian, German, and French—will be studied in translation. Students with knowledge of any of these languages are encouraged to bring the originals into discussion and to use them for translation assignments.

The first purpose of the seminar is to provide knowledge of poetry from the past and from around the world. The second purpose of the seminar is to provide students with a grounding to write poetry themselves. Weekly exercises include posted comments, translations, and poems.

Lyric Poetry in Six Acts

Act I    Graeco-Roman and Medieval: Poetry of Violence, Fame, and Love 

Act II      Middle East: Poetry of Love and of Faith. Meditations on Death

Act III    China and Japanese: Poetry of Passion. Poetry of Reflection

Act IV    The Renaissance: Poetry as Art and about Art

Act V     The Romantics: Poetry as Expression

Act VI    The Modern Age: Poetry in a Dying World
 

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Freshman Seminar 33x. Complexity in Works of Art: Ulysses and Hamlet

Instructor: Philip FisherView Site

 

Mondays, 3-5 pm | Location: Sever 212

Is the complexity, the imperfection, the difficulty of interpretation, the unresolved meaning found in certain great and lasting works of literary art a result of technical experimentation?  Or is the source extreme complexity—psychological, metaphysical, or spiritual?  Does it result from limits within language, or from language’s fit to...

Read more about Freshman Seminar 33x. Complexity in Works of Art: Ulysses and Hamlet

AFRAMER 232. The Ethnic Avant-Garde

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 211
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

We begin with Steven S. Lee’s 2015 book, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, a study of the relation between minority writers and the Soviet Union. How can this model apply to other minority vanguardist literatures? What is or what was the avant-garde? How should we read that phrase today? Recent debates in Black Studies over temporality, periodization, affect, and antagonism, suggest that we may not have an adequate theory of the avant-garde, or at least we may need to update the ones we inherit from Renato Poggioli (1968) and Peter Bürger (1984) in their accounts of the historical formation of European vanguards. By revisiting the avant-garde, we renew a concept that touches on a wealth of topics of interest to contemporary theoretical and methodological debates: taste, politics, publics and counter-publics, signifying, archives, transnationalism, translation, incompleteness, failure, and the circulation and manipulation of new medias. There are also the classic questions: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "avant-garde" or avant-gardes? What is the relationship between avant-garde artistic movements and political or militant ones? This course will explore these themes comparatively, with readings drawn from poems, plays, novels, films, and ranging widely across the African diaspora, South and East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This is a graduate seminar and will typically only admit graduate students; undergraduate students may apply for special permission in writing but admittance will be strictly limited. 

English 226s. Renaissance Ego-Documents

Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Koerner
Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Sackler 521
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

Jakob Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance invented the self has been vigorously challenged, but it gets at something that happened in the representation of personal identity first in Italy in the 14th century and then throughout the rest of Europe. This course will consider several of the writers whose self-representations have long drawn critical attention– More, Elizabeth I, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton – but now accompanied by such figures as Mary Sidney, George Gascoigne, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Carew, Francis Bacon, Anne Clifford, and   Margaret Cavendish.  The English examples will be set alongside key figures in the European Renaissance:  Petrarch in Italy, Montaigne in France, and Cervantes in Spain.    Students will be encouraged not only to reach out to a broad range of geographical possibilities but also to cast a wide cultural net (so as to include, for example, Osman of Timisoara or Glickl of Hameln).  As represented in such works as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Michel de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun, inquisitorial inquiries and witchcraft testimonies will also fall within the range of ego-documents that we will investigate.  The seminar will be coordinated with a related course in the Art History Department taught by Professor Joseph Koerner, so that textual representations of the self will be set alongside a wide array of comparable representations in the visual arts.  A central question will be the relationship between words and pictures in the fashioning of identity.... Read more about English 226s. Renaissance Ego-Documents

English 231. Divine Comedies: Graduate Seminar

Instructor: Nicholas Watson
Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

A study of a series of visionary works written between the thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, including Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, John of Morigny's Book of Flowers, Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. We read these works as contrasting products of a particular (and time-limited) conception of the imagination as an instrument of human perception and its affordances and dangers as this conception meets ancient traditions of writing about the validity or otherwise of dreams and of spiritual, or perhaps corporeal, descents into hell and/or ascents to heaven. We consider the inter-relationship between the poetic and the visionary in light of the categories of "orthodoxy" and "discretion of spirits" during a period when both were fiercely contested. We also consider visionary writing as a precursor of the concept of the "fictional" and of the novel, with particular reference to W. G. Sebald's 2001 novel Austerlitz.

Space permitting, this course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Please contact Prof. Watson before classes begin if you would like to take the course.

English 264x. Sensation and Moral Action in Thomas Hardy

Instructor: Elaine Scarry
Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

Approaches Hardy's novels, stories, and narrative poems through the language of the senses (hearing, vision, touch) and through moral agency (philosophic essays on "luck'' and "action'').

Open to upper-level undergraduates with permission of instructor.

English 295li. Literary Institutions: The Archive

Instructor: Kelly Mee Rich
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

This course addresses the role of the archive in literary and cultural studies. It examines the debates, theories, and methods that emerge in relation to archival research, particularly around issues of memory, recovery, access, materiality, and the relationship between research and researcher. The syllabus includes units on power and history, bodies and affect, reading along or against the grain, photography and mediation, colonial archives, the Black Atlantic, and human rights. Assignments are designed to encourage students to a) consider the influence of archival encounters in their specific field and/or discipline; b) develop relationships with local archives and greater orientation in such literary institutions; and c) reflect on how the archive might bear on their approach to literary study. This seminar is open to all graduate students in the arts and humanities.

AFRAMER 120x. African American Theater

Instructor: Glenda Carpio and Robin Bernstein
Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 316
Enrollment: limited to 12 students
Course Site
 

This course investigates the history of African American theatre from the antebellum era through the present.  Students will: a) gain knowledge of the general history of Black theatre in the United States; b) develop understanding of what African Americans have done with and through theatre—that is, how theatre has been a vital tool for Black politics, culture, communities, and knowledge; and c) develop hands-on skills in archival research while critically analyzing the functions of archives in a Black context. We will read plays and scholarly analysis, work directly with historical artifacts in the Harvard Theatre Collection, and attend a live performance of James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prizewinning play, Fat Ham, after which we will have a classroom conversation with the playwright. The course culminates with a flexible project in which students will engage deeply with artifacts in a Harvard archive. 

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 149sb. Literature, Science, and the Body in 18th-Century Britain

Instructor: Carlisle Yingst
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Barker 211
Course Site

What is the relation between the humanities and the sciences? What separates these broad fields of knowledge, and how do ideas move between them? This course will consider these and related questions by turning back to a moment when the boundaries between disciplines were not so clear, and by focusing on an especially rich site for considering them: medicine and writing about the body in eighteenth-century Britain.

 

Exploring this time and place—characterized by increasing public access to scientific knowledge, innovations in literary culture, and continuous interactions between them—the course will take as its starting point the waning of humoral theory and the emergence of the British novel; continue through the Enlightenment foundations of modern medicine; and conclude with a book often read as issuing a humanistic challenge to science: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We’ll read work by physicians, novelists, and poets, as well as by writers who brought literature and medicine together, like Tobias Smollett (whose surgical training shaped his novels’ descriptions of the body), Erasmus Darwin (whose poetry about the natural world was deeply intertwined with his medical studies), and William Earle (whose fictional account of obeah was shaped by a British physician practicing in Jamaica.)

 

More specific topics and themes are likely to include: plague narratives; accounts of illness and disability; colonialism and indigenous medicines; the popular circulation of race-science and -medicine; and anatomical and literary representations of gender, sex, and sexuality. Other readings may include: Cavendish, Defoe, Haywood, Sancho, Sterne, Austen, and the contemporary novelist Jordy Rosenberg, as well as shorter selections from periodicals, letters and diaries, physician's notes, and other related material.


This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 184cf. City Fictions

Instructor: Tara K. Menon
Monday & Wednesday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: Sever 103
Course Site

Cities are made of contradictions: playgrounds for the rich and sites of concentrated poverty, highly organized and totally chaotic, an endless party and the loneliest places on earth. How do we write about them? In this course, we will visit four major metropolises around the world: London, Bombay, New York, and Seoul. We will focus primarily on one narrative work set in each of these cities—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk—and supplement our reading with short stories, journalism, sociology, and movies by writers including: Zadie Smith, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Katherine Boo, and Spike Lee.

What techniques do fiction writers, journalists, and filmmakers use to capture the constituent features of life in urban environments? What can one genre do that another cannot? How do these narratives represent social interactions? How do they depict interiority and consciousness? What kinds of characters are included in the field of vision? What kind of labour, if any, is represented? How, if at all, does the identity of the writer shape the stories they are telling? Other topics under consideration: class, race, gender, industrialisation, finance, greed, alienation, strangers, estrangement, economic inequality, cosmopolitanism, crime, immigration. No previous experience in English Department courses is required. 

English 186cc. Climate Change Literature

Instructor: Sarah Dimick
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Barker 211
Course Site

This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st century works—including science fiction, spoken word poetry, narrative fiction, and film—we will analyze how literature shapes and responds to planetary crisis. Which imaginative currents—apocalyptic, technocratic, communalist, militaristic—are molding readers’ visions of the climatic future? Is it possible to narrate climate change as a multi-century catastrophe rooted in colonialism and the acquisition of capital? What can we learn about climate change from literature that we can’t grasp through other fields of study? Since the works in this class cover a broad geographic range and include relatively unknown books as well as award-winning texts, we will also theorize how—and why—particular writers’ voices become central or peripheral within climate discourse.

Authors may include Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Cherie Dimaline, Amitav Ghosh, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and John Lanchester. As an inherently interdisciplinary course, both English concentrators and concentrators from other fields are welcome to enroll.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 188gr. Global Fictions

Instructor: Kelly Mee Rich
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Sever 102
Course Site

What stories do we tell to make sense of our world? This course serves as an introduction to contemporary fiction in English, as well as a survey of approaches to reading postcolonial and transnational literatures. Along the way, we will consider issues of migration, cosmopolitanism and globalization, human rights, racial and sexual politics, and international kinship. Authors will most likely include Teju Cole, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Jamaica Kincaid, Katie Kitamura, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, Arundhati Roy, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, and Monique Truong. This class is part lecture, part discussion. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

GENED 1165. Superheroes and Power

Instructor: Stephanie Burt
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Science Center Hall E
Course Site

What’s a hero? What’s a superhero? Who gets to be one, and who decides? Why are superheroes so popular now? What do their stories tell us—casual viewers and devoted readers, fans and non-fans and aspiring writers-- about how power works, about its social, emotional, material and economic dimensions, and about how we represent power in art? This course looks at superheroes, famous and infamous, old and new, in comics, on TV, in movies and novels and poems, as ways to answer questions about how power operates in our society and in others: power and violence, power and persuasion, power and social cohesion, power and disability, power and the sources of the self. You’ll read great and not-so-great superhero and superhero-adjacent stories from Gilgamesh to Wolverine, Wonder Woman to Ms. Marvel by way of John Milton. You’ll learn how to see the shape of a story, how to consider form style, technique in comics and other media. You’ll learn how to look at markets, at states and at the law, at fan communities and fan cultures, at the kinds of power stories and characters exercise in the real world. You’ll discover thinkers from politics, psychology, literary studies, and religion, among them Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, and Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, with something to say about power. You might even create some superheroes yourself.  This course will show you not just how to read a set of very complicated, often underrated, influential modern stories, but how to think about power in public, in fiction, and in everyday life: who decides how others live, who decides what’s normal, who gets to make, and who gets to break, the rules.

GENED 1167. Climate Crossroads

Instructor: James Engell and James Anderson
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45am | Location: Harvard Hall 201
Course Site

What one thing is changing everything in your lifetime—and for generations to come? It’s changing what you eat; it’s changing buildings you live in; and it’s changing politics, the arts, and finance. The change is accelerating. This course reveals fundamental alterations that climate disruption is bringing to multiple human activities and natural phenomena.

The course represents a crossroads in two senses. First, it’s a crossroads of disciplines. Climate change affects science, society, culture, government policy, biodiversity, and environmental justice. To understand it is inherently interdisciplinary and requires standing at the crossroads of several approaches. Second, humanity itself is at a new crossroads. Because global climate is shifting rapidly, this prompts new views of humans in geologic time, as well as new thinking in economics, law, finance, and science.

Climate change isn’t just “global warming.” It’s an alteration of conditions on Earth to which all creatures and societies are adjusting. What is the science of climate change? Why can’t understanding and dealing with climate change be confined to science?

Through materials and assignments that address quantitative understanding and qualitative judgment, you’ll learn why it’s unwise to seal the interrelated issues of climate change in separate disciplines; conversely, why it’s necessary to use separate disciplines to acquire the knowledge and applications needed to formulate policy and actions. You’ll learn about climate adaptation (adjusting to changing climate), mitigation (reducing the speed and severity of climate change), and resilience (e.g., recovering from extremeweather events). You’ll discover how careers in many different areas increasingly involve thinking about climate.

English 90ah. Asian American Theater and Performance

Instructor: Ju Yon Kim
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 024
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

This seminar will explore Asian American theater and performance. We will examine how Asian American theater and performance artists have responded to popular images of Asian immigrants and cultures; how Asian American theater companies have cultivated and expanded our understanding of American theater and Asian American identity; and how artists and productions have experimented with conceptions of racial and gender performance. 

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.


English 90ff. Indigenous Sci Fi, Horror, Fantasy, and Futurisms

Instructor: Christopher Pexa
Thursday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Lamont 401
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

This course will examine contemporary writings by Native American and Indigenous authors across the genres of sci fi, horror, and fantasy, with the aim of thinking about Native American and Indigenous futures (and futurisms) more broadly, and also in ways that may exceed genre altogether. In other words, our investigation will be organized according to conventional sci fi genres of slipstream, alien contact, and apocalypse, but also to non-genre expressions of Indigenous futurity. By juxtaposing literary works from authors writing both within the boundaries of the United States and beyond, we will be able to make connections between them that highlight both their common sovereignty struggles and shared utopian visions, but also keeps in view the many meaningful differences in how Native American and Indigenous aesthetic productions perform the work of future-making.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 90gs. Global Shakespeare

Instructor: Leah Whittington
Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 018
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

William Shakespeare drew on texts from around the world when he wrote plays for the London theater he named “The Globe.” Since Shakespeare’s plays were first performed in early modern England, they have become global texts, adapted and re-fashioned for diverse international audiences. This course investigates key plays by Shakespeare in relation to their multi-cultural sources and their global adaptations. Students will explore how these plays dramatize distinctly early modern approaches to nationality, ethnicity, and cross-culturalism, locating Shakespeare’s works within their own historical moment of cultural transition and change. At the same time, we will study how the plays have been re-interpreted and transformed by contemporary writers, playwrights, actors, and directors from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. How do these contemporary performances negotiate between old and new, local and global, canonicity and cultural plurality? Tracking questions of translation, cosmopolitanism, race, gender, and regional theatrical traditions, we will ask: what can the story of Shakespeare’s worldwide reach tell us about how “global” literature is conceived today? 

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 90pw. Every Play Ever Written

Instructor: Derek Miller
Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Barker 018
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

This course explores the history of dramatic writing and publishing in the US and Europe by studying every play ever written. Of course, we cannot actually study all those plays—that’s the point. When we learn cultural history, we necessarily encounter only a small fragment of all cultural artifacts, whether they be paintings, novels, or plays. What does it mean that we learn cultural history in this piecemeal fashion? That we study drama and yet know nothing, nothing of most dramatic writing? How should we, as people invested in the theater and its history, think about our unfathomable ignorance? And what is the relationship between those plays we do see, act in, or read, and the vastly larger number of plays we will never encounter?

This seminar puts theatrical texts in perspective by focusing on the relationship between the exemplary texts that we anthologize and the forgotten archive of, well, everything else. We will approach this problem by comparing selected exemplary texts to lists of plays and by situating both our examples and our lists within their theatrical contexts. We will worry particularly about the relationship between the examples and the lists, hypothesizing about what we can and cannot truly know about all the plays we have not read.

This course, in short, explores the limits of our knowledge of cultural history. We seek not to answer questions definitively so much as to understand better those things we do not and cannot know about theater. We will learn, in other words, what we can never learn. This is a seminar intended for any student. No previous experience in English Department courses or in studying theater is required.

Pages