Fall Term 2024
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Course Information
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.
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 102m. Introduction to Old English: Charms, Herbals, Folk Medicine, Miracle Cures
Instructor: Daniel Donoghue
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Course Site
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.
Instructor: Stephen Greenblat
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 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 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.
English 180aw. American Women Writers
Instructor: Maggie Doherty
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: TBD
Course Site
This course is organized thematically, and loosely chronologically, around the vexed and contested category of American women’s literature. Our readings and discussions will prompt questions about this central theme. How do we define “women” or “women writers”? What does the literature produced by such writers look like? How do the writers in our course engage with social and political questions, particularly those relating to gender, race, and other markers of identity? Where is America, and what does it mean to write about it? How do women writers participate in—or challenge—the American literary tradition? Could the writers in our course be said to have developed a literary tradition of their own? Through critical analysis of texts from a range of writers—including Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, and Cristina Rivera Garza—we will collectively propose provisional answers to these questions. As we do so, we will also develop our critical reading and writing skills through the completion of formal and informal writing assignments.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 187nd. Indigenous Literatures of the Other-than-Human
Instructor: Christopher Pexa
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Course Site
“Indians are an invention,” declares an unnamed hunter in Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Ojibwe) 1978 novel, Bearheart. The hunter’s point, as Vizenor has explained in interviews and elsewhere, is not that Indigenous peoples don’t exist, but that the term “Indian” is a colonial fiction or shorthand that captures, essentializes, and thus erases a vast diversity of Indigenous lives and peoples. This course begins from the contention that other categories, and maybe most consequentially that of “nature,” have not only historically borne little resemblance to the lived lives of Indigenous people but have been used as important tools for capture and colonization. We will begin with European writings on the “noble savage” who lives harmoniously in a state of Nature, then move to Indigenous writers and thinkers whose work refuses this invention, along with its corollary category of the supernatural. We will spend most of our time reading 20th- and 21st- century Indigenous literary depictions of other-than-human beings and Indigenous relationships with those beings, highlighting how forms of kinship with them are integral to Indigenous ways of understanding difference, to acting like a good relative, and to Indigenous practices of peoplehood. Readings may include works by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ella Deloria, Louise Erdrich, Stephen Graham Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Leanne Simpson, Kim TallBear, and Gerald Vizenor, among others.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
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 191rw. Reading for Fiction Writers
Instructors: Neel Mukherjee and Laura van den Berg
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 45 students
Course Site
There is no writing without reading. This is an unimpeachable and incontrovertible fact that all writers know. Ask any writer why they became a writer, and they'll tell you that it's because they read. Octavia Butler, who came from a poor family, once said that she became a writer because she had access to public libraries. Books, in other words; they showed her what was possible. What kind of training in reading prepares one to become a writer? This is an open-enrollment creative writing course that will introduce you to some extraordinary writers who will inspire you, make you think, make you quarrel with them, fill you with wonder and awe and, sometimes, bafflement. It is by no means representative in any way, nor is it exhaustive, nor does it have any historical ordering. It is meant to be a stepping-stone to possibilities, to greater imaginative and creative worlds.
The list is diverse in terms of genres. We will read sci-fi (Ursula K. Le Guin, Butler), fairytale inspired fiction (Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi), metaphysical fiction (Leo Tolstoy), realist fiction (Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant). We will consider fiction through the lens of race and gender and politics (Mavis Gallant, Edward P. Jones, Vivek Shanbagh, Annie Ernaux), and read several writers who wrote in languages other than English (Anton Chekhov, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar). We will learn how to read closely, to interpret stories and novels, to figure out what literary works mean and, most importantly, how they embody their meanings in form. We will look at the wide spectrum of effects writers create in their texts. We will also be asking ourselves throughout the semester: How do writers read other writers? What are the technical things they look out for when they are reading? These conversations will, in turn, inform the creative work you generate this semester.
This class will be co-taught by two creative writing faculty members, Professors Laura van den Berg and Neel Mukherjee. The lecture component of the course will meet twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, for 75 minutes per session; one of those classes will be largely devoted to craft Q & A and workshopping student writing. You will also meet for an hour-long section (separate from the weekly lectures) each week where you'll have the opportunity to do your own creative writing. This will involve writing exercises, imitations of writers we will be reading, flash fiction, and other writing prompts.
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.
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 90fd. The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
Instructor: John Stauffer
Thursday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 25 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 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 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 90ls. Literacy Stories
Instructor: Deidre Lynch
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
This seminar explores literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy movements past and present, in theory and practice. Engaging with recent fictions and memoirs by authors such as Elena Ferrante and Ocean Vuong, with African-American slave narratives, and with materials from the history of alphabet books and children’s literature, “Literacy Stories” investigates the rich, ambivalent ways in which literature has depicted the literacy needed to consume it. Given under the auspices of the English Department and Harvard’s Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship, “Literacy Stories” also involves collaborations with various community organizations devoted to literacy advocacy and instruction.
This class will give us the opportunity to reflect—something we’ll do in part by learning about the many ways of relating to texts that flourish beyond the limits of Harvard Yard—on the contradictory ways in which we value reading. We’ll consider, for example, the friction between solitary and social reading: how the pleasures of this activity lie sometimes with how it separates us from others and sometimes with how it connects us. We will be thinking about literacy’s long-standing association with individual self-determination and thinking about how that association is put into question whenever people’s reading matter gets weaponized as an instrument of their domination. Literacy, the literary and theoretical texts on the syllabus will alike remind us, has a politics. Learning to be literate often involves experiences of unequal power relations and exclusion. Reading with (rather than “to” or “at”) others is an ethical challenge—one that all humanities concentrators and all students interested in social justice ought to explore.
Note: This course can be credited toward the Graduate School Education’s secondary field in Educational Studies. This course may also be credited towards the Harvard College Certificate for Civic Engagement.
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.
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 91r. Supervised Reading and Research
The Supervising Reading and Research tutorial is a type of student-driven independent study offering individual instruction in subjects of special interest that cannot be studied in regular courses. English 91r is supervised by a member of the English Department faculty. It is a graded course and may not be taken more than twice, and only once for concentration credit. Students must submit a proposal and get approval from the faculty member with whom they wish to work.
Proposed syllabi and faculty approval must be submitted and verified by the English Department Undergraduate Office by the Course Registration Deadline.
Fall 2024 Junior Tutorials
Banned Books: Censorship, Ethics and Twentieth-Century Literature (Andrew Koenig)
Science Fictional and Magical Realities (Karina Mathew)
Black Literature and the Ethics of Betrayal (Jordan Taliha McDonald)
Monsters & Monstrosity (Emily Sun)
Religion and Transcendentalism: Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman (Adam Walker)
Junior Tutorial assignments will be made in early April 2024. Junior tutorial preference forms were distrubuted to concentrators on March 27 and are due by April 3. If you didn't receive this form and would like to be considered for tutorial enrollment, please contact Lauren Bimmler.
Fall 2023 Junior Tutorials
Provisional Magic: Trends in Experimental Contemporary Poetry (Nicholas Belmore)
Human, Mind, Machine: Artificial Intelligence from Antiquity to AI (Vanessa Braganza)
Crime Fiction (Sarah Liu)
Critical Approaches to the Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (Joseph Shack)
A Variety of Unfreedoms: 20th and 21st Century Narratives of Slavery, Neo-Slavery, and Emancipation (Denson Staples)
Supervised individual tutorial in an independent scholarly or critical subject.
Students on the honors thesis track will register for English 99r in both the fall and spring terms.
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 287na. Novel Anxieties
Instructor: Beth Blum
Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
This graduate seminar offers an overview of seminal works of anxiety theory by Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, May, Beck, Salecl, and Ngai, as well as in-depth analysis of modern and contemporary authors who thematize and formalize anxiety in their works (for instance, Joyce, Woolf, Larsen, Heti, Moshfegh, Andersson, Offill, Lerner, Cole). We will examine the specificity of modern anxiety by exploring literary responses to total war, technology, climate change, psychopharmacology, race, sexuality, upward mobility, and more.
English 294z. On Beauty: Graduate Seminar
Instructor: Elaine Scarry
Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
Philosophic and literary accounts of beauty from Greek through modern, including Plato, Aquinas, Dante, Kant, Keats, and Rilke. In addition, the major arguments against beauty; and its stability across four objects (gods, gardens, persons, and poems).
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.
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.