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    English Cwwr. Narrative Nonfiction. Writing Wrongs: Women, Gender and Journalism: Workshop

    Instructor: Susan Faludi
    Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Lamont 401
    Course Website
    Enrollment: Limited to 12 students

    This is a workshop class where students will learn the art of literary longform journalism and compose stories that take on questions of gender, feminism, sexuality and power, while simultaneously exploring how the media represents gender and learning the history of women in journalism. No profession has been as important to feminists in challenging society than journalism--even as journalism has been historically resistant to a feminist vision. Students will master the fundaments of great reporting and writing—interviewing, structure, voice, style, and ethics—while crafting their own magazine-style stories that grapple with ground-level gender dramas.

    Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a writing sample of about 1,000 words in any genre that showcases your creative abilities, along with a note about why you want to take the class and what your writing interests are. If you have previous journalism/literary writing experience, please include that, too.

    Apply via Submittable (deadline: Saturday, January 15 at 11:59pm ET)

    English 320. G1 Proseminar

    Instructor: Nicholas Watson
    Wednesday, 9:30-11:30am | Location: Barker 222

    The first-year proseminar (taken in the spring semester of the first year) introduces students to the theories, methods, and history of English as a discipline, and contemporary debates in English studies. The readings feature classic texts in all fields, drawn from the General Exam list. This first-year proseminar helps students prepare for the General Exam (taken at the beginning of their second year); it gives them a broad knowledge for teaching and writing outside their specialty; and it builds an intellectual and cultural community among first-year students.

    Note: This seminar is only for first year graduate students in the English Department.

    Gen Ed 1138. Consent

    Instructor: Elaine Scarry
    Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Sever 103

    Consent will be studied in four domains: Part I-the relation of consent and the body in marriage, in medicine, and in state citizenship; Part II – the act of consent and dissent in war (beginning with the dissent of Achilles in the Iliad and including readings up to the present); Part III – freedom of movement, freedom of entry and exit in citizenship (including contexts where right of movement has been denied); Part IV – consent as the basis of cultural creation. The nature of individual and collective deliberation is at the center of the course throughout. Readings include: philosophic accounts of consent (Plato, Locke, Rousseau), case law (Plessy v. Ferguson, Pratt v. Davis, Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital), constitutional writings (Federalist Papers 4, 7, 8, 23, 25, 27-29, 41; Madison’s Record of Federal Assembly; Ratification Debates ), plays (Euripides’ Hecabe, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, five U.S. suffrage plays), poetry (Iliad), films (Philadelphia Story, It Happened One Night), novels (Tale of Two Cities), and historical narratives (Thucydides selections, Underground Railroad narratives).

    Note: This course fulfills the "Ethics and Civics" General Education requirement

    English 90pw. Every Play Ever Written

    Instructor: Derek Miller
    Wednesday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: Lamont Library 401
    Course Website
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

    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 can not know about theater. We will learn, in other words, what we can never learn.

    Comparative Literature 123. Isolation and Islands

    Instructor: Marc Shell
    Monday, 3:00-5:00pm | This course will be taught remotely, via Zoom, in Spring 2022.

    Islands, both a part of and apart from the main, offer ready-made laboratories for linguistic, biological and political investigation. Islandness as such encourages national literature, philosophy, and vacation.  Our seminar, with its ecological and philosophical focus, centers on fictional an factual islands as well as Canadian ice floes, the always changing marine coastlines of  tidal islands, and Planet Earth itself,   Critical readings  include: Peter Sloterdijk’s Foams, Judith Shalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, Sigmund Freud’s writings on his own world as “a little island of pain swimming in a sea of indifference,”  Immanuel Kant’s  “History of Lands and Islands,” and Shell’s Islandology. Literary and filmic works  include Shakespeare’s Hamlet,  John Donne’s argument that “No man is an island,” Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,  More’s Utopia, Hae-Jun Lee’s “Castaway on the Moon,” Joseph Newman’s “This Island Earth,”  and island travel (and vacation) literature chosen by us as a group. Requirements: one short paper and one term paper.

    ENGL S-116. Asian American Genre Fictions

    Instructor: Ellen Song, PhD
    Lecturere on History and Literature
    Day & Time: Mondays & Wednesdays 12:00–3:00pm (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35052
    Limited to 25 students

    There was an explosion of works by Asian American authors published around the turn of the millennium, an unexpected consequence of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which brought an influx of immigrants from Asia and dramatically altered the demographic composition of the US. This course examines the many different genres and forms of contemporary Asian American fiction...

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    ENGL S-139. England After Empire

    Instructor: Duncan E. White, DPhil.
    Lecturer on History and Literature
    Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays 8:30–11:30am (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35056
    Limited to 19 students

    This course considers the way England was transformed through the demise of its empire after the Second World War through to the advent of Brexit. From the birth of the welfare state to the rise of Thatcherism, from post-colonial migration to multicultural Britain, from the swinging sixties to punk rock and riots, we track these radical political, social, and cultural changes...

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    ENGL S-127. Staging Shakespeare

    Instructor: Derek Miller, Professor of English
    Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:00–3:00pm (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35368
    Limited to 15 students

    The plays by William Shakespeare pose serious challenges for actors, directors, designers, and audiences—challenges they must solve in performance. Because Shakespeare's plays have such a long history in the theater, they offer a unique window into ever-evolving performance aesthetics. In staging Shakespeare, artists attempt both to capture what they perceive as Shakespeare's universal achievements and...

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    ENGL S-182H. Poetry in America: Whitman and Dickinson

    Instructor: Lisa New, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature
    Day & Time: On Demand*
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35384
    Open Enrollment

    This course focuses on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two influential and iconic American poets of the nineteenth century. First, we encounter Walt Whitman, a quintessentially American writer whose work continues to bear heavily upon the American poetic tradition. We explore Whitman's relationship to the city, the self, and the body through his life and poetry. Then, we turn to Emily Dickinson, one of...

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    ENGL S-140. The Rise of the Novel

    Instructor: Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Emeritus
    Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays 8:30–11:30am (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35352
    Open Enrollment

    Literary narrative goes back to ancient times, but the novel, as the term is used today, did not appear until the seventeenth century, and only in the eighteenth century did it establish itself as the dominant literary form of our culture. This course explores the eighteenth-century novels long considered the best and most important, both for their achievement in developing the...

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    ENGL S-117. How to Change the World

    Instructor: Andrew Warren, PhD
    Associate of the Department of English and Co-Chair, Seminar in Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities, Mahindra Humanities Center
    Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:00–3:00pm (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 34817
    Limited to 45 students

    Writers have long imagined new worlds as a way of changing this one. As Percy Shelley said way back in 1821, creative writers are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." This course asks how literature depicts and intervenes in the world and models new worlds. It reads works...

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    ENGL S-238. Indigenous Literatures

    Instructor: Rebeccan H. Hogue, PhD
    Lecturer on History and Literature
    Day & Time: Mondays & Wednesdays 8:30–11:30am (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35355
    Limited to 45 students

    This course introduces fiction and poetry in a small sampling of the over 1,000 native nations across Turtle Island in North America and Oceania. Thematically, we consider a variety of contemporary issues that impact indigenous story-telling today: environmental and social justice; gender and sexuality; land rights and city life; war and extractive capitalism; and the law...

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    ENGL S-257. Superheroes and Power

    Instructor: Stephanie Burt, PhD
    Professor of English
    Day & Time: Mondays & Wednesdays 12:00–3:00pm (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35152
    Limited to 50 students

    What makes superheroes popular? How can they help us think about power, belonging, queerness, race, citizenship, art, or disability? In this course we explore those questions in Marvel and DC favorites (especially the X-Men) as well as in older literature, independent comics, novels, and readings from several critical disciplines.

     

    This course meets on campuus...

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    ENGL S-237. Myth and Mystery in Post-World War II US Short Fiction

    Instructor: Patrick Whitmarsh, PhD
    Lecturer on History and Literature
    Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays 3:15–6:15pm (EDT)
    Location: Science Center 110
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 35390
    Open Enrollment

    This course surveys a host of short prose fiction published in the United States after 1945. Ranging from canonical works by Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth to lesser-known works, including several by women and writers of color, this course explores the various ways that authors grapple with political uncertainty, social instability, and cultural...

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    ENGL S-207. The Culture of Capitalism

    Instructor: Martin Puchner, PhD
    Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature
    Day & Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:00–1:30pm (EDT)
    Summer 7-week session | CRN 33124
    Open Enrollment

    The course asks how literature, theater, and film have captured the spirit of capitalism—fueling its fantasies, contemplating its effects, and chronicling its crises. More than just an economic system, capitalism created new habits of life and mind; it also created new values, forged and distilled by new forms of art. Core readings by...

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