English CMMU. Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Using Music

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff
Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

In this workshop-based class, students will think deeply about how music is often at the center of their experiences, may it be as a song, an album, an artist, their own relationship with an instrument, etc. This class will entail writing true stories about one's life in which the personal and music orbit and/or entangle each other. This will include some journalism and criticism, but above all it will ask you to describe how and why music matters to your lived life. We will read work by Hayao Miyazaki, Jia Tolentino, Kaveh Akbar, Oliver Sacks, Susan Sontag, Adrian Matejka, among many others, (as well as invite and talk with guest speaker(s)). This class is open to all levels.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Applications for this class should include a 2-3 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250-word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.

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

Instructor: Philip Fisher
Thursday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

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 thought and perception?  Do the inherited forms found in literature permit only certain variations within experience to reach lucidity?  Is there a distinction in literature between what can be said and what can be read?  The members of the seminar will investigate the limits literature faces in giving an account of mind, everyday experience, thought, memory, full character, and situation in time.  The seminar will make use of a classic case of difficulty, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a modern work of unusual complexity and resistance to both interpretation and to simple comfortable reading, Joyce’s Ulysses.  Reading in exhaustive depth these two works will suggest the range of meanings for terms like complexity, resistance, openness of meaning, and experimentation within form.

Humanities 10a: A Humanities Colloquium: From Homer to Morrison

Instructors: Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Menand, Jesse McCarthy, Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, Kathleen Coleman, Alison Simmons
Tuesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD
Course Site

A Humanities Colloquium: from Homer to Morrison:  2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10a will tentatively include works by Homer, Sophocles, Sappho, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Mary Shelley, Marx, Kafka, Du Bois, and Morrison. One 75-minute lecture plus a 75-minute discussion seminar led by the professors every week. Students will receive instruction in critical writing one hour a week, in writing labs and individual conferences. Students also have opportunities to participate in a range of cultural experiences, ranging from plays and musical events to museum and library collections.

Note: The course is open only to first-year students. Students who complete Humanities 10a meet the Harvard College Curriculum divisional distribution requirement for Arts & Humanities. Students who take both Humanities 10a and Humanities 10b fulfill the College Writing requirement. This is the only course outside of Expository Writing that satisfies the College Writing requirement. No auditors. The course may not be taken Pass/Fail. Students must apply to be admitted to the course. Enrollment is limited to 90.

English 229s. Edmund Spenser and the Art of Theory

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

A seminar on the poetry of Spenser and the practice of theory. In contrast to Milton, Spenser thinks as he writes and also lets the poem think for him. He does not think with poetry but through it. One consequence is that the kind of poem he writes—an allegory—invites us to think along with it as well, in our own terms. In the seminar, we will attend to the tensions in Spenser’s imagination between personal expression, social and political structure, and cosmic order. Alongside the poems, especially "The Faerie Queene", we will read some major works of literary theorists from the postwar period to the present day.

English 90qm. Metaphysical Poetry: The Seventeenth-Century Lyric and Beyond

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.

English 90hn. The Harvard Novel

Instructor: Beth Bulm
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

This course addresses the genre of the “Harvard novel,” from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, in order to examine Harvard’s status and signification within the cultural imaginary. It brings together novels (and some films) where Harvard offers the narrative setting, supplies a character’s backstory, or even serves as a character in its own right. We will address themes of tradition, access, privilege, race, anxiety, competition, and canonicity. 

In addition to serving as an introduction to 20th-21st century Anglo-American literature, this seminar is designed to offer students an opportunity to slow down and engage more reflectively with the meaning and substance of their time on campus. Lectures will explore narrative depictions of how Harvard experiences extend into broader society, and also thelarger trajectory of the individual’s post-collegiate life. 

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

English 10. Literature Today

Instructor: Stephanie Burt
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD
Course Site

All literature was contemporary at some point, but the literature that is contemporary now provides special opportunities for enjoying, questioning, and understanding the world. Literature Today focuses on works written since 2000—since most of you were born. It explores how writers from around the world speak to and from their personal and cultural situations, addressing current problems of economic inequality, technological change, structural prejudice, and divisive politics. We will encounter a range of genres, media, and histories to study contemporary literature as a living, evolving system. The course uniquely blends literary study and creative writing—students will analyze literature and make literature. The conviction that these practices are complementary will inform our approach to readings and course assignments.

Note: English 10 is one of the required Common Courses for the English concentrators. The course is designed as a “gateway” course for first and second year students, but it is open to all undergraduates.

English 20. Literary Forms

Section 1 Instructor: Christopher Pexa
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 27 students
Course Site

Section 2 Instructor: Leah Whittington
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 27 students
Course Site

This foundational course for English concentrators examines literary form and genre. We explore some of the many kinds of literature as they have changed over time, along with the shapes and forms that writers create, critics describe, and readers learn to recognize. The body of the course looks to the great literary types, or modes, such as epic, tragedy, and lyric, as well as to the workings of literary style in moments of historical change, producing the transformation, recycling, and sometimes the mocking of past forms. While each version of English 20 includes a different array of genres and texts from multiple periods, those texts will always include five major works from across literary history: Beowulf (epic), The Winter’s Tale (tragicomedy or romance), Persuasion (comic novel), The Souls of Black Folk (essays; expository prose), and Elizabeth Bishop’s poems (lyric). The course integrates creative writing with critical attention: assignments will take creative as well as expository and analytical forms.

Note: English 20 is one of the required Common Courses for English concentrators and Secondaries and is a limited enrollment course which will prioritize sophomores and first-years; juniors and seniors who want to take it as an elective will be considered for any remaining spots. Enrollment priority exceptions may be made for people changing concentrations or presenting other notable reasons.

English 97. Sophomore Tutorial: Literary Methods

Tutorial Instructor: Namwali Serpell
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

This course, taught in small groups and required for concentrators, introduces theories, interpretive frameworks, and central questions about literature and literary media. What do we do when we read? What is an author? What do we mean by “literature” itself? How might we compare and evaluate interpretations? How do the historical, social, cultural, and legal frameworks around a text shape its meanings and its effects? Combining major critical and theoretical writings with primary works, the course investigates how literary production and interpretation are informed by philosophical and aesthetic traditions, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, national and post-colonial identities, and the material forms in which literature circulates, from parchment books to the internet. Students will also practice fundamental literary research methods through close engagement with Harvard libraries.

Note: English 97 is one of the required Common Courses for English concentrators and is open to sophomores and first-years planning to concentrate in English. Enrollment priority exceptions may be made for people changing concentrations or presenting other notable reasons.

English 187r. Thinking Through Writing: Science Themes

Instructor: Claire Messud and Melissa Franklin
Wednesday, 3:45-5:15pm | Location: TBD
Course Site

This is an open-enrollment writing course, cross-listed in both English and Physics, that requires writing 300 words a day, 4 days a week, all semester, responding to prompts. We will consider a variety of writing genres and ways to engage with science concepts: non-fiction, journalism, fiction, poetry, etc. The writing portion of the class aims to enable students above all to explore writing freely, with the expectation that they will learn how to express themselves more lucidly and effectively as they grow in literary understanding. This year’s theme is “The Time Things Take." In science, we ask questions like: what is the lifetime of a particle; how long does it take for raindrops to fall; how long does it take the universe to expand; how long does it take a rocket ship to reach infinity. And we ask ourselves how we might measure these times. This course will consider scientific concepts, the questions we can pose about them, and the thought experiments we might perform. The literary portion of the class involves close readings of these texts from a writerly perspective, also addressing questions of time and narrative, including pacing and form. We will examine precision in diction and syntax, the use of metaphor and other rhetorical strategies.

The course has no prerequisites in either English or Physics. There will be no problem sets. The course will involve two lectures per week + a section. The final assessment will be a portfolio and a presentation.

Note: English 187r is also offered as Physics 187r. Students cannot take both courses for credit.

English 199ad. Adaptation: The Art of Retelling

Instructor: Anna Wilson
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Course Site

What makes a good adaptation? Why retell an old story? This class explores texts that are in conversation with others: adaptation, translation, fanfiction, parody, pastiche, and the remix. We will think about the role of form, genre, and media in adaptation, the decisions involved in transposing a story from novel to screen or stage, from oral storytelling to the printed page to digital archive, across times, contexts, languages, and audiences. Texts/movies discussed include fairytales, The Great Gatsby, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Arrival. We will also consider the legal frameworks, technologies, cultural institutions, and audience expectations that constrain adaptation: what is the nature of authorship? How much can a person own a text, or a character? How far can an adaptation go before audiences no longer recognize, or reject, an adaptation? What economic and cultural roles do adaptations play in our contemporary media landscape? The final assignment will include the option to create your own adaptation using some of the critical models we have explored. This is a lecture and discussion class accessible to non-concentrators.

GENED 1034. Texts in Transition

Instructors: Leah Whittington, Ann Blair
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15 pm | Location: TBD
Course Site

We live in a moment of “crisis” around regimes of preservation and loss. As our communication becomes ever more digital— and, therefore, simultaneously more ephemeral and more durable—the attitudes and tools we have for preserving our culture have come to seem less apt than they may have seemed as recently as a generation ago. This course examines how texts have been transmitted from the past to the present, and how we can plan for their survival into the future. We will examine what makes texts durable by considering especially the media by which they are transmitted, the changing cultural attitudes toward their content, and the institutions by which they are preserved. The European Renaissance will provide a central case study. During this period scholars became aware of the loss of ancient texts and strove to recover and restore them insofar as possible. These interests prompted new developments in scholarly conservation techniques which we still value today (philology, libraries, and museums) but also the creation and transmission of new errors, ranging from well-intentioned but overzealous corrections and “improvements” to outright forgeries. What can the Renaissance teach us about how to engage productively with these problems, both as the source of our current attitudes toward preservation and loss, and as a case study of another culture dealing with anxiety over preservation and loss? Ultimately, we hope that students will be able to think productively about how to preserve from the past and the present for the future, while recognizing that all preservation inherently involves some kind of transformation.

English 121s. Shakespeare from Beginning to End: A survey of works, both plays and poems, across his whole career.

Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD
Course Site

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.

English 178n. The American Novel Since 1900

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

This course is a survey of the American novel since 1900: its forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural contexts, and intertextual networks. We will pay special attention to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—e.g. what is beautiful? how do we know? what should we do?—in the American milieu over the course of the twentieth century and beyond.

We will read around ten authors selected from among the following: L. Frank Baum, Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lisa Halliday, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Valeria Luiselli, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Vladimir Nabokov, John Okada, Thomas Pynchon, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jean Toomer, Nathaniel West, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton...

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

Fall Term 2024

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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 CACD. The Art of Criticism

Instructor: Maggie Doherty
Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

This course will consider critical writing about art–literary, visual, cinematic, musical, etc.—as an art in its own right. We will read and discuss criticism from a wide variety of publications, paying attention to the ways outlets and audience shape critical work. The majority of our readings will be from the last few years and will include pieces by Joan Acocella, Andrea Long Chu, Jason Farago, and Carina del Valle Schorske. Students will write several short writing assignments (500-1000 words), including a straight review, during the first half of the semester and share them with peers. During the second half of the semester, each student will write and workshop a longer piece of criticism about a work of art or an artist of their choosing. Students will be expected to read and provide detailed feedback on the work of their peers. Students will revise their longer pieces based on workshop feedback and submit them for the final assignment of the class.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Please write a letter of introduction (1-2 pages) giving a sense of who you are, your writing experience, and your current goals for your writing. Please also describe your relationship to the art forms and/or genres you're interested in engaging in the course. You may also list any writers or publications whose criticism you enjoy reading. Please also include a 3-5-page writing sample of any kind of prose writing. This could be an academic paper or it could be creative fiction or nonfiction.

English 90ln. Harvard and Native Lands

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.

English 296r. Repetition

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

This course considers the relationship between art and repetition. We will go beyond the repetition of content—sequels; adaptations—to explore repetition as artistic form (such as the sonnet or a musical theme and variations) and repetition as an essential practice for producing (editing and revising) and consuming art. We will investigate the varieties of repetition in the arts and consider how a general theory of art and repetition helps us better understand art as a human practice. Examples include literature, theater, music, and visual art, but students are expected to pursue their own interests in course assignments.


English CACF. Get Real: The Art of Community-Based Film

Instructor: Musa Syeed
Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 student
Course Site

“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us,” the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami said, “unless it’s inside a frame.” For our communities confronting invisibility and erasure, there’s an urgent need for new frames. In this workshop, we’ll explore a community-engaged approach to documentary and fiction filmmaking, as we seek to see our world more deeply. We’ll begin with screenings, craft exercises, and discussions around authorship and social impact. Then we each will write, develop, and shoot a short film over the rest of the semester, building off of intentional community engagement. Students will end the class with written and recorded materials for a rough cut. Basic equipment and technical training will be provided.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class. Please also discuss what participants/communities you might be interested in engaging with for your filmmaking projects. For your writing sample, please submit 3-5 pages of your creative work from any genre (screenwriting, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc.)

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