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    English 90rv. Empire and Revolution, Sex and Gender, Race, Slavery, and Abolition

    Instructor: James Engell
    Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course site

    The literatures of race and slavery, gender, empire, democracy, and revolution that shaped our modern world.  Excerpts from Dryden, Astell, Behn, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Johnson, Equiano, Gibbon, Paine, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Blake, and Shelley.  Some fiction as well.

    This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

    This course satisfies the English Concentration "Migrations" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

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

    English 90fd. The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

    Instructor: John Stauffer
    Thursday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    This course is a critical examination of the speeches and rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who are among the greatest orators and nonfiction writers in English. We explore Douglass’s and Lincoln’s rhetorical practices, especially in relation to their politics and self-making. Along the way, we analyze the influences (the Bible, the literary canon at the time, journalism, regional writings) that contributed to their oratory. And we explore the contexts of their great speeches and their legacies.

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

    English 145a. Jane Austen's Fiction and Fans

    Instructor: Deidre Lynch
    Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location:  TBD
    Course Site

    When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Jane Austen began to write, the novel was still liable to be dismissed by serious readers and writers on both moral and aesthetic grounds. Austen’s achievement helped to transform the genre, helping establish fiction as the form that (paradoxically enough) explains reality and as the form that explains us to ourselves. In this class we'll read all six of Austen’s novels and study the contribution they made to the remaking of modern fiction. Though our emphasis will fall on these works’ place in the literary culture of Austen’s day and on their historical contexts in an era of political, social, and literary revolution, we’ll also acknowledge the strong and ardent feelings that Austen’s oeuvre continues to arouse today. To that end, we’ll do some investigating of the frequently wild world of contemporary Austen fandom and the Austenian tourism, shopping, adaptations, and sequels that nurture it. At the same time, we’ll also remember that Austen knew fandom from both sides; part of our work this semester will be to learn about the early-nineteenth-century cultures of literary appreciation in which Austen both enrolled the heroines of her fiction and enrolled herself.

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

    English 151an. The Age of the Novel

    Instructor: Tara K. Menon
    Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location:  TBD
    Course Site

    What does the novel still have to offer? As newer genres—movies, television, Youtube, TikTok—compete for our attention, why do people still immerse themselves in long works of prose fiction? And why do certain nineteenth-century British novels continue to captivate so many readers to this day? In this course, we will read four nineteenth-century novels by four authors that many consider to be the greatest writers that have ever lived: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. We will pay close attention to technique: how do these novels work? And we will also explore social and political themes: what are these novels about? At every stage, we will consider the unique capacities of narrative fiction: what can the novel do that other genres can’t? Implicitly and explicitly, this course will argue first, that these superlative nineteenth-century novels let us see the world (not only then but also now) in new ways, and second, that the novel is a tool for thinking that beats all others. Alongside these texts, we will watch film, television and theatre adaptations as well as read contemporary criticism to better understand the enduring legacy of these canonical works.

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

    English 90lv. Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf

    Instructor: James Wood
    Monday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: TBD
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    In this seminar, we’ll be looking at the ways in which a range of writers represent the mind on the page: the mind at thought, in agitation, at rest, at prayer, in distress, in rebellion, and just doing nothing (or apparently nothing). This examination allows us to scrutinize just over a hundred years of novelistic development and experiment – from 1813 to 1927, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf – a period that might rightly be considered the high-point of the novel’s rise. We will discover that as the novelistic treatment of consciousness changes, so the idea of what a mind (or a self) is, also changes: the form (the means of representation) modifies the content (what is represented). What might seem at first like a fairly small thing – a question of novelistic technique – will turn out to have massive and far-reaching consequences for our sense of self. 

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