Instructor: Alan Niles Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: 2 Arrow St 408 Course site
Shakespeare’s plays have always been “popular” in the multiple senses of the word: drawing on a stock cultural repertoire of characters and themes, appealing to mass audiences from the public theater of Shakespeare’s time to the screens of today, and succeeding (and surviving) in a competitive literary marketplace. This course explores these multifaceted aspects of Shakespeare’s “popularity” and the ways the enduring legacy of Shakespeare’s works has depended on complex crossings between their status as “elite” and “popular” culture. Through readings, lectures, and class activities, we will situate Shakespeare’s plays in relation to topics including the social experience of playgoing in Shakespeare’s time; racism, misogyny, and radical politics on the stage; theories of popular culture, mass culture, and subcultures from Shakespeare’s time to the present; Bardolatry and Shakespeare’s long reception history; and Hollywood, Bollywood, and global cinematic appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays today. Readings will include such plays as A Winter’s Tale, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pericles, Henry VI, Part 2, and more. Prior experience reading Shakespeare may be helpful but is not expected or required.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Shakespeare" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
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.
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.
Instructor: Daniel Donoghue Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 024 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
J. R. R. Tolkien's day job at Oxford was professor of medieval English literature. Throughout his career he cultivated a deep acquaintance with early English and other literatures from the cultures of northwestern Europe, which informed the fantasy worlds he created. We will read broad selections from translations of works that he drew from: Old English poems, Norse sagas, Celtic literature, and the Finnish Kalevala. Although Tolkien’s fiction will not be an integral part of the syllabus, we will make occasional connections to passages from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and/or Silmarillion. The readings of medieval literature will be supplemented by relevant criticism.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Gordon Teskey Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
In an age of scientific and political revolution, how do poets respond when common beliefs about God, humans, cosmic and social order, consciousness, and gender have been taken away? Modern poetry starts in the seventeenth century when poets, notably women poets, sought new grounds for poetic expression.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
We will begin with Shakespeare's early slasher play, Titus Andronicus, and read works from the full course of his career, sampling all of his major genres: comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Along the way, we will consider one or more of the "problem plays" that challenge all generic categories. In addition to his writing for the stage, we will read his long erotic poem, "Venus and Adonis" and a selection of his sonnets. We will learn about the Elizabethan theater and publishing industry, the class system, and the government censorship. And we will acquire a sense of Shakespeare dominant styles, his methods, and his recurrent obsessions.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Alan Niles Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
Harvard’s beginnings included a promise to educate both “English and Indian youth.” From its inception, however, Harvard’s endowment included Native lands expropriated through war, theft, and coercion. Drawing inspiration from Harvard’s own Legacy of Slavery initiative and the Land-Grab Universities website, this class will conduct original research on Harvard’s long history of involvement with Native communities and Native lands. We will work hands-on with archives at Harvard and other area institutions, developing research skills in navigating collections, reading early handwriting, and interpreting colonial documents. Readings and class activities will engage New England colonialism, the long history of Indigenous dispossession and resistance, and the political struggles of Indigenous communities today. We will closely examine texts including poems, speeches, oral narratives, maps, short stories, and deeds, exploring the centrality of land and environment in colonial and Indigenous histories and literatures. In the second half of our class, we will work collaboratively to design and execute group or individual research projects. Previous iterations of this course in Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 gathered data on Harvard’s land transactions and resulted in a set of student-driven research projects on sites, properties, and individuals connected to Harvard’s Indigenous pasts; our research will build on that work.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Note: Interested students should petition to enroll on my.harvard. In your petition, say a few words about your interest in the course (including concentrations you are considering if you are undeclared), any requirement the course may satisfy, and whether you have taken any other History & Literature seminars. Please contact the instructor if you have any questions.
This course is also offered through the History and Literature Department as Hist-Lit 93 AD. Credit may be earned for either English 90LN or Hist-Lit 93 AD, but not both.
Instructor: Anna Wilson Tuesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. Course Site
This course focuses on representations of race, religion, and cross-cultural contact in literature written in western Europe between approximately 800 and 1450 CE, before colonial contact with the Americas. During this period, diplomats, pilgrims, and merchants crisscrossed Europe and Asia, generating fascination with far-away lands and a booming trade in exotic goods; Christian kingdoms of western Europe formed uneasy alliances under the banner of a shared religion to invade Muslim territories and sack Jewish communities in the Crusades; and a global pandemic spread via fleas on ship rats, killing hundreds of thousands and fomenting xenophobic violence. We will read texts from a variety of genres, including religious plays, romances about inter-faith marriage, chansons de geste (poems celebrating deeds in war, often grotesquely violent), and ‘armchair travel’ guides. We will trace the emergence of modern concepts of race and ethnicity in the way medieval Christian writers represented religious difference in/as bodily difference; develop a critical, historically-situated toolkit for analysing medieval concepts and terms around race, ethnicity, and nation; and analyse the role of the middle ages in current conversations about race in America.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Joseph A. Shack Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Course Site
Translations of excerpts from Beowulf will proceed in parallel with careful reading of Heaney's verse translation. Questions concerning translation theory will emerge from the comparison of in-class efforts with Heaney's and other versions. What is the relation between translation and interpretation? How does Heaney's Beowulf compare with the body of poetry he has produced over the decades? The course begins with a review of grammar.
Recommended Preparation: English 102.
Note: Students who complete both English 102 and 103 with honors grades will fulfill the College language requirement and the English Department’s Foreign Literature requirement.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Anna Wilson Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Course Site
What makes stories so pleasurable and revealing but also so enraging and dangerous? How are we to think about the strong emotions they evoke and learn to resist as well as appreciate their power? This course revisits Geoffrey Chaucer's classic fourteenth-century poem, The Canterbury Tales: the deepest and most caustically entertaining analysis of storytelling ever written. The Canterbury Tales consists of a series of tales told by members of a pilgrimage on their way from London to Canterbury, representatives of the internally divided social world of Chaucer’s England. Some are serious, others funny, obscene, or offensive; some are religious, others not at all; some deal with issues local to England, others range across the Europe and the rest of the known world; many are told against other pilgrims. Written in a long-ago past, the poem jumps off the page, in turns unrecognisably weird and startlingly modern. We read the poem in the language in which it was written, Middle English, easy and fun to learn with early help: no previous experience with the language, or with the medieval era, is necessary. We will also explore the poem's long-ranging impact on English literature, including several contemporary reimaginings. Classes include a short lecture on a tale, and class discussion, which continues in weekly sections. Course projects include an essay, a collaborative report on one tale, and a creative option. Students of all years and from all concentrations and programs are welcome. If you are a graduate student interested in taking this class, please contact Prof. Wilson to indicate interest before term begins; there may be an additional graduate section if there is sufficient demand.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Alan Niles Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Course Site
This class is an introduction to Shakespeare’s writings and their representations of sex, gender, romance, love, and queerness. We will study poems about erotic and queer desire, plays that stage ideas about gender and gender fluidity, and film adaptations that bring modern perspectives to race and sexuality. Readings will include such plays as Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure; Shakespeare’s Sonnets; and films by Derek Jarman, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Julie Taymor. Prior experience reading Shakespeare may be helpful but is not expected. Throughout our course, we will ask: how are the forms of gender identity and sexual expression we encounter in Shakespeare’s works familiar, or different? How might they challenge, inspire, or disturb us today?
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Nicholas Watson Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
Julian of Norwich (born 1343) and Margery Kempe of Lynn (born 1373) are the two earliest women writers in English whose names we know. They lived thirty years and thirty miles apart, met only once over a period of some days, and wrote long, completely different books, both inspired by what they understood as visionary encounters with the divine. Julian was a Christian intellectual, a brilliant writer, intensely visual but also abstract, who spent a lifetime writing and rewriting an intricate and optimistic analysis of how to live as an aspiring and suffering human being in the world that many people around the world still live by. Margery (she did not much like her husband’s name) was a religious experimentalist, devout globe-trotter and performance artist, equally brilliant, whose energies seemed to have gone into living more than writing, but who in old age dictated then revised what many understand as the first English autobiography. After being mostly ignored for several hundred years, they are now being read with care, although by different readerships and in different ways. It is time they were brought together again.
In this discussion-based course, we read the versions of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love and The Book of Margery Kempe closely alongside one another, as well as in the light of passages from other women writers who drew, or may have drawn, inspiration from visions, revelations, and dreams, from the early Christian martyr Perpetua of Carthage in the third century CE to the reclusive New England poet Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth. We consider how it was that revelations were able to make an innovative, demanding and prestigious mode of thought and writing possible for women who were excluded by their gender from the formal education available to male contemporaries. We think about what revelations are, how they function as an embodied, kinetic, and dialogic mode of consciousness, and the stylistic and intellectual experimentation this mode of consciousness enables. We speculate on potential connections between the visionary and other non-natural ways of seeing the world, such as through the thing we call “fiction,” this last with the help of a novel by Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, where Julian makes a brief appearance. Finally, we consider the excruciating difficulty of being and writing as a visionary and the cultural and psychic pressures the role of visionary involved and involves. Although the main setting of the course is the world of Julian and Margery, we do not forget that we are reading them in the now.
Note: This course is a limited-enrollment seminar open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Alan Niles Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Sever 206
This course is an introduction to the different voices, cultures, and traditions that made the first 1000 years of English literature, from Beowulf to Aphra Behn. We will study major and influential writings alongside lesser-known interlocutors—works by Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, John Milton, Alexander Pope, and more. We will engage with the (often contested) social, political, and religious contexts that gave rise to creative work. We will pay particular attention to the historical transformations of romance, epic, drama, fable, and lyric, and the ways these forms were embedded in the social worlds of their time.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Arrivals" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Alan Niles Wednesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Henry VIII, “Bloody” Mary, Queen Elizabeth; Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne. In a little over a century, the Tudor dynasty reshaped English literature, culture, and politics. The Tudors have continued to shape popular imaginations of the English past ever since, being variously conscripted for the ideological work of Britain’s expanding empire, hailed as a privileged origin point for modernity, and transformed into popular novels, films, and TV series. This course explores the history and culture of the Tudor period and its enduring hold on our cultural imagination. Through readings, discussions, and class activities, we will explore such topics as narratives of the Protestant Reformation, the history of sexuality and queer erasure, race and colonialism in the early modern world, and literary transformations including the emergence of the literary market and the public stage. Readings will include poems, plays, and experimental prose writings by Thomas More, John Bale, Anne Askew, Thomas Wyatt, Anne Lok, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Donne, as well as more recent films, novels, and TV shows including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, and Toby Marlowe and Lucy Moss’s musical Six.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: HArvar Hall 202
An exploration of Shakespeare at work: what plot devices was he particularly drawn to? how did he develop characters? how did he characteristically construct scenes? how did he handle dialogue? The course will also examine some of the conditions within which he worked: the structure and economics of his theater, censorship, the resources of his language, training in rhetoric, the assumptions of his audience, the nature of his competition. Students will try their own hand at “Shakespearean playwriting,” including drafting scenes, on the basis of surviving primary materials, from two lost plays, the one a tragedy of political assassination, the other a romantic tragicomedy of love, betrayal, and madness. Written assignments will include the playwriting assignments, two papers, and the compiling of a list of Shakespeare’s favorite tricks-of-the-trade.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Shakespeare" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
This course combines language study with the investigation of a critical theme. The narratives set for translation provide a thematic coherence as we dig into the language of Old English, which is the vernacular used in England from the sixth century until about 1100. Although some of its features remain recognizable today, Old English needs to be learned as a foreign language with its own spelling, pronunciation, syntax, and so on. The term begins with an emphasis on grammar, which will be covered in graduated steps until midterm, after which the readings and translation will take up more of our class time.
The unifying theme of the readings will be remedies to preserve the health of the human body. Old English literature offers an abundance of medical texts, including herbal remedies and magical incantations. Some come from ancient Greek and Latin sources, while others are local folk recipes. Some are fantastical, some are known to be effective, and others clearly rely on the placebo effect. The readings will move from simple prose to intricate poetry. An end-of-term project will assign each student a short Old English magical charm—think of it as a human utterance charged with power to control nature. With the help of personal coaching, each student will produce a literal and a creative translation.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Note: Fulfills the College language requirement if its continuation, English 103, is also completed.
Fanfiction is a surprisingly powerful tool for examining medieval literature. It sheds light on the dynamics of rereading and transformation that characterizes medieval literary culture, which in turn deepen our own understanding of the nature of creativity. In this class we will read some twentieth- and twenty-first century retellings of medieval stories, including fanfiction, alongside medieval literary texts that rewrite, reimagine, or let their authors star in pre-existing stories. This medieval fanfiction will include different takes on the medieval superhero Sir Gawain (including the 2020 movie starring Dev Patel), unauthorized additions to The Canterbury Tales, and medieval Christian devotional manuals which encourage their readership to participate in imaginative exercises where they imagine themselves as participating in events in the life of Jesus Christ. Along the way we will learn what medieval readers and writers thought of questions like, what is an author? What is literature? What is a character? And what happens in our brains when we read?
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Gordon Teskey Spring 2024: Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Course Site Spring 2025: TBD
This course focuses on Milton’s most famous work, Paradise Lost, the greatest long poem in English and the only successful classical epic in the modern world. Milton went totally blind in his forties and composed Paradise Lost by reciting verses to anyone available to take them down, like the blind prophets and poets of legend. Yet the moral and political questions he raised—what is the human? what is gender? what is the political? what is religion? what is dissent? what is legitmacy? what is revolt?—are surprisingly enduring and modern. His own solutions to these questions may not be ours, but his abilility to provoke thought on them speaks to our time. We will consider how Milton generates the sublime and how he builds great scenes and characters, especially his most famous one, Satan.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Gordon Teskey TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Shakespeare’s career in playwriting (1589-1611) divides into two creative phases, each one lasting a decade. At the center is his most famous play, Hamlet (1600-1601), which closes with a roar of cannons, a premonition of the great tragedies to come. Before Hamlet, Shakespeare’s poetic style is brilliant, declamatory, and virtuosic. He discovers as he writes his own astonishing powers of expression, his uncanny ability to represent character from the inside and, not the least of these, his skill at plotting. Before Hamlet, Shakespeare is a crowd-pleasing entertainer who is gathering his powers. The plays of this period, especially the comedies, offer some of the purest delights in the theatre.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Leah Whittington TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
This course traces the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the diverse responses of Petrarch, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Dryden, exploring how Renaissance writers fashioned their own poetry in response to the generative power of Ovid’s work.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
