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.
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.
This course investigates the history of African American theatre from the antebellum era through the present. Students will: a) gain knowledge of the general history of Black theatre in the United States; b) develop understanding of what African Americans have done with and through theatre—that is, how theatre has been a vital tool for Black politics, culture, communities, and knowledge; and c) develop hands-on skills in archival research while critically analyzing the functions of archives in a Black context. We will read plays and scholarly analysis, work directly with historical artifacts in the Harvard Theatre Collection, and attend a live performance of James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prizewinning play, Fat Ham, after which we will have a classroom conversation with the playwright. The course culminates with a flexible project in which students will engage deeply with artifacts in a Harvard archive.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 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.
What is the relation between the humanities and the sciences? What separates these broad fields of knowledge, and how do ideas move between them? This course will consider these and related questions by turning back to a moment when the boundaries between disciplines were not so clear, and by focusing on an especially rich site for considering them: medicine and writing about the body in eighteenth-century Britain.
Exploring this time and place—characterized by increasing public access to scientific knowledge, innovations in literary culture, and continuous interactions between them—the course will take as its starting point the waning of humoral theory and the emergence of the British novel; continue through the Enlightenment foundations of modern medicine; and conclude with a book often read as issuing a humanistic challenge to science: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We’ll read work by physicians, novelists, and poets, as well as by writers who brought literature and medicine together, like Tobias Smollett (whose surgical training shaped his novels’ descriptions of the body), Erasmus Darwin (whose poetry about the natural world was deeply intertwined with his medical studies), and William Earle (whose fictional account of obeah was shaped by a British physician practicing in Jamaica.)
More specific topics and themes are likely to include: plague narratives; accounts of illness and disability; colonialism and indigenous medicines; the popular circulation of race-science and -medicine; and anatomical and literary representations of gender, sex, and sexuality. Other readings may include: Cavendish, Defoe, Haywood, Sancho, Sterne, Austen, and the contemporary novelist Jordy Rosenberg, as well as shorter selections from periodicals, letters and diaries, physician's notes, and other related material.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Cities are made of contradictions: playgrounds for the rich and sites of concentrated poverty, highly organized and totally chaotic, an endless party and the loneliest places on earth. How do we write about them? In this course, we will visit four major metropolises around the world: London, Bombay, New York, and Seoul. We will focus primarily on one narrative work set in each of these cities—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk—and supplement our reading with short stories, journalism, sociology, and movies by writers including: Zadie Smith, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Katherine Boo, and Spike Lee.
What techniques do fiction writers, journalists, and filmmakers use to capture the constituent features of life in urban environments? What can one genre do that another cannot? How do these narratives represent social interactions? How do they depict interiority and consciousness? What kinds of characters are included in the field of vision? What kind of labour, if any, is represented? How, if at all, does the identity of the writer shape the stories they are telling? Other topics under consideration: class, race, gender, industrialisation, finance, greed, alienation, strangers, estrangement, economic inequality, cosmopolitanism, crime, immigration. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.
This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st century works—including science fiction, spoken word poetry, narrative fiction, and film—we will analyze how literature shapes and responds to planetary crisis. Which imaginative currents—apocalyptic, technocratic, communalist, militaristic—are molding readers’ visions of the climatic future? Is it possible to narrate climate change as a multi-century catastrophe rooted in colonialism and the acquisition of capital? What can we learn about climate change from literature that we can’t grasp through other fields of study? Since the works in this class cover a broad geographic range and include relatively unknown books as well as award-winning texts, we will also theorize how—and why—particular writers’ voices become central or peripheral within climate discourse.
Authors may include Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Cherie Dimaline, Amitav Ghosh, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and John Lanchester. As an inherently interdisciplinary course, both English concentrators and concentrators from other fields are welcome to enroll.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
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.
What stories do we tell to make sense of our world? This course serves as an introduction to contemporary fiction in English, as well as a survey of approaches to reading postcolonial and transnational literatures. Along the way, we will consider issues of migration, cosmopolitanism and globalization, human rights, racial and sexual politics, and international kinship. Authors will most likely include Teju Cole, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Jamaica Kincaid, Katie Kitamura, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, Arundhati Roy, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, and Monique Truong. This class is part lecture, part discussion. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
“Constellations” is an attempt at putting key literary works in conversation with significant texts from other disciplines and discourses --- philosophy, politics, history, law, and the social sciences. The conversations initiated between these texts might converge on conceptual or historical issues; on other occasions, they may conflict on matters of aesthetic form or cultural belief. What gives these ‘coupled” conversations a thematic or curricular coherence is their sustained interest in the life-worlds of minorities as they struggle to gain the recognition and protection of human rights. One of the key questions running through the course will be what it means to make a claim to human dignity from a position of inequality and injustice.
I have chosen landmark texts that describe a wide arc of historical experience from colonization and segregation to migration and the predicament of refugees. These conditions of life and literature will be framed by questions of national sovereignty and international cosmopolitanism. Discourses of race, gender and identity will intersect with conceptual issues of cultural representation and literary form. The conversations initiated by this course will be polyphonic and plural.... Read more about English 191c. Constellations
Indigenous literatures are not simply subsets of settler national literatures—they have deep roots in their respective homelands, through which storytellers, scholars, artists, activists, and visionaries have explored and articulated their own imaginative, political, and relational concerns and commitments. From codices and winter counts to wampum belts, totem poles, medical formulae books, songs, treaties, letters, autobiographies, histories, poems, stories, novels, podcasts, comic books, plays, and many other expressive forms, Indigenous literatures across the world are as varied in aesthetic concern and literary technique as in political, cultural, and historical context. And while necessarily grappling with the violence of colonialism, Indigenous literatures extend far beyond the limitations of the settler imaginary. This introductory course will connect students with a range of key Indigenous texts and issues as well as critical work about the field from English, Indigenous Studies, and related disciplines, framed through four key themes: sovereignty, land, kinship, and futurity.
Spring 2025 Instructor: Christopher Pexa TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Introduction to Indigenous Literary Studies: Poetry, Prose, and Politics" introduces students to critical conversations in English, Indigenous Studies, and related disciplines by exploring key themes of sovereignty, land, kinship, and futurity.
English 197LS fulfills the Harvard College Arts & Humanities divisional distribution requirement and an English Concentration elective requirement. This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
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.
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.
How do we draw the line between being yourself and performing yourself, between acting and authenticity?
“To thine own self be true,” runs the famous line in Hamlet. But which self? And why? And who’s judging? Does this injunction to be authentic even make sense today, when profiles proliferate online and surveillance is ubiquitous? Acting—the art of creating and reproducing selves—can help us navigate these questions. Just as every century’s approach to acting tells us something about their idea of personhood, so too can our own era’s quandaries around empathy, personae, identity, work, art-making and politics be explored through our approach to acting. This course will examine the construction of private and public selves across eras and disciplines, through a combination of lectures, screenings, readings, and talks. Sections and examinations will be practice-based, focused on a single basic task: students will be asked to turn into each other over the course of the term. THIS COURSE IS OPEN TO ACTORS AND NON-ACTORS.
This is a lecture course with a strong practical component. Full course meets Wednesdays from 12pm-2:45pm for lecture and acting workshops, with additional mandatory discussion sections (1h/week) to be scheduled on Thursdays/Fridays. No previous experience of acting or English classes is required, although a willingness to immerse yourself in both reading and performance is expected.
How and why does the U.S. Civil War continue to shape national politics, laws, literature, and culture---especially in relation to our understanding of race, freedom, and equality?
Most of us were taught that the Civil War (which most Northerners called a "Rebellion") was fought on battlefields chiefly in the American South between the years of 1861-1865. In this narrative, the North won and the South lost. But what if the issues were never resolved? What if the war never ended? This course analyzes the ways in which the United States is still fighting the Civil War, arguably THE defining event in U.S. culture. In each class, we connect current events to readings and themes from the past, highlighting how and why the war is still being fought. From Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 to the riot (or battle) in Charlottesville and the seditious conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results, we explore the ways in which the South has won the war, even though the Rebellion was destroyed and the Constitution radically altered. We explore the different kinds of war—ideological, political, cultural, military, and para-military—that placed the unfreedom of blacks—as slaves, serfs, and prisoners—at the center of larger conflicts over federal versus state and local rule; welfare; globalization; and "free trade." We analyze the Civil War in literature, art, politics, photography, prints, film, music, poetry, speeches, and history, while also discovering how these cultural forms worked to shape our memory of the event itself. We will on occasion have guest speakers. By the end of the course, we will be able to understand how and why contemporary U.S. debates are rooted in this defining narrative, and we will better understand the dilemmas the nation faces today.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Stephanie Burt Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Science Center Hall E Course Site
What’s a hero? What’s a superhero? Who gets to be one, and who decides? Why are superheroes so popular now? What do their stories tell us—casual viewers and devoted readers, fans and non-fans and aspiring writers-- about how power works, about its social, emotional, material and economic dimensions, and about how we represent power in art? This course looks at superheroes, famous and infamous, old and new, in comics, on TV, in movies and novels and poems, as ways to answer questions about how power operates in our society and in others: power and violence, power and persuasion, power and social cohesion, power and disability, power and the sources of the self. You’ll read great and not-so-great superhero and superhero-adjacent stories from Gilgamesh to Wolverine, Wonder Woman to Ms. Marvel by way of John Milton. You’ll learn how to see the shape of a story, how to consider form style, technique in comics and other media. You’ll learn how to look at markets, at states and at the law, at fan communities and fan cultures, at the kinds of power stories and characters exercise in the real world. You’ll discover thinkers from politics, psychology, literary studies, and religion, among them Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, and Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, with something to say about power. You might even create some superheroes yourself. This course will show you not just how to read a set of very complicated, often underrated, influential modern stories, but how to think about power in public, in fiction, and in everyday life: who decides how others live, who decides what’s normal, who gets to make, and who gets to break, the rules.
What one thing is changing everything in your lifetime—and for generations to come? It’s changing what you eat; it’s changing buildings you live in; and it’s changing politics, the arts, and finance. The change is accelerating. This course reveals fundamental alterations that climate disruption is bringing to multiple human activities and natural phenomena.
The course represents a crossroads in two senses. First, it’s a crossroads of disciplines. Climate change affects science, society, culture, government policy, biodiversity, and environmental justice. To understand it is inherently interdisciplinary and requires standing at the crossroads of several approaches. Second, humanity itself is at a new crossroads. Because global climate is shifting rapidly, this prompts new views of humans in geologic time, as well as new thinking in economics, law, finance, and science.
Climate change isn’t just “global warming.” It’s an alteration of conditions on Earth to which all creatures and societies are adjusting. What is the science of climate change? Why can’t understanding and dealing with climate change be confined to science?
Through materials and assignments that address quantitative understanding and qualitative judgment, you’ll learn why it’s unwise to seal the interrelated issues of climate change in separate disciplines; conversely, why it’s necessary to use separate disciplines to acquire the knowledge and applications needed to formulate policy and actions. You’ll learn about climate adaptation (adjusting to changing climate), mitigation (reducing the speed and severity of climate change), and resilience (e.g., recovering from extremeweather events). You’ll discover how careers in many different areas increasingly involve thinking about climate.
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.
Instructor: Ju Yon Kim Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 024 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
This seminar will explore Asian American theater and performance. We will examine how Asian American theater and performance artists have responded to popular images of Asian immigrants and cultures; how Asian American theater companies have cultivated and expanded our understanding of American theater and Asian American identity; and how artists and productions have experimented with conceptions of racial and gender performance.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
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.
Instructor: Christopher Pexa Thursday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
This course will examine contemporary writings by Native American and Indigenous authors across the genres of sci fi, horror, and fantasy, with the aim of thinking about Native American and Indigenous futures (and futurisms) more broadly, and also in ways that may exceed genre altogether. In other words, our investigation will be organized according to conventional sci fi genres of slipstream, alien contact, and apocalypse, but also to non-genre expressions of Indigenous futurity. By juxtaposing literary works from authors writing both within the boundaries of the United States and beyond, we will be able to make connections between them that highlight both their common sovereignty struggles and shared utopian visions, but also keeps in view the many meaningful differences in how Native American and Indigenous aesthetic productions perform the work of future-making.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 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: 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: Derek Miller Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
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 cannot know about theater. We will learn, in other words, what we can never learn. This is a seminar intended for any student. No previous experience in English Department courses or in studying theater is required.
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.
Instructor: Maria Dikcis Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
Who gets to count as human? This ostensibly simple question has been complicated anew in the 20th and 21st centuries by a series of historical events and cultural representations that have racialized people of color as robots, unfeeling machines, and other synthetic forms of life. In this seminar, we will explore the fractured, queer affinities between race and artificial intelligence by considering, on the one hand, how racialized subjects have been stigmatized or oppressed through comparisons with machinic forms of life and, on the other hand, how AI has become a productive means for people of color to envision new modes of expressing emotions, sustaining communities, and challenging racism. Throughout, we will examine a wide range of literary genres—including poetry, fiction, memoir, and comics—as well as a selection of sci-fi films and new media artworks. Our explorations will start well before the digital age, in the year 1946, as we look to the graphic memoir Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo, which documents the daily life of Japanese internment camps and serves as an early inquiry into the racialization of Asian Americans as mechanized laborers and clones. We will conclude with Stephanie Dinkins’ artworks Conversations with Bina48 and Not the Only One, which over seventy-five years later explore how Black cultural practices, community formations, and storytelling methods can resist and re-code the exclusionary histories of artificial intelligence systems. For the final project, students will have the option to produce an AI prototype oriented towards racial justice (no prior technical knowledge required).
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Tara K. Menon Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Sever 112 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
“No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell wrote. Indeed. But how do we know what these biases are? How can we read not for plot or character but for ideology? Or rather, how can we read plot and character closely in order to uncover the political unconscious of a novel? How exactly does the novel “do” politics? What are its capacities and limitations as a genre? To answer these questions, we will read some of the most canonical realist novels of the nineteenth century: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Tess of the D’Urbervilles alongside classic works of literary criticism (Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Elaine Scarry, Claudia Johnson, and more). This is an intermediate/advanced seminar. Previous experience in English Department courses is recommended, but not necessary. If you are concerned about the level of the course, please send me an email.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 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.
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.
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)
Instructor: Paul Yoon TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Advanced fiction workshop for students who have already taken a workshop at Harvard or elsewhere. The goal of the class is to continue your journey as a writer. You will be responsible for participating in discussions on the assigned texts, the workshop, engaging with the work of your colleagues, and revising your work.
Supplemental Application Information:*Please note: previous creative writing workshop experience required.* Please submit ONLY a cover letter telling me your previous creative writing workshop experience, either at Harvard or elsewhere; then tell me something you are passionate about and something you want to be better at; and, lastly, tell me why of all classes you want to take this one this semester. Again, please no writing samples.
Instructor: Jesse McCarthy Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
This is an intermediate course in the art of writing literary fiction. Previous experience with workshopping writing is encouraged but not required. The emphasis of the course will be learning how to read literature as a writer, with special attention given to the short story, novella, or short novel. We will read these works from the perspective of the writer as craftsperson and of the critic seeking in good faith to understand and describe a new aesthetic experience. We will be concerned foremost with how literary language works, with describing the effects of different kinds of sentences, different uses of genre, tone, and other rhetorical strategies. Together, we will explore our responses to examples of literature from around the world and from all periods, as well as to the writing you will produce and share with the class. As a member of a writing community, you should be prepared to respectfully read and respond to the work of others—both the work of your peers and that of the published writers that we will explore together.
Supplemental Application Information: This course is by application only but there are no prerequisites for this course and previous experience in a writing workshop is not required. In your application please submit a short letter explaining why you are interested in this class. You might tell me a bit about your relationship to literature, your encounter with a specific author, book, or even a scene or character from a story or novel. Please also include a writing sample of 2-5 pages (5 pages max!) of narrative prose fiction.
Instructor: Laura van den Berg Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
This course will serve as an introduction to the fundamentals of writing fiction, with an emphasis on the contemporary short story. How can we set about creating “big” worlds in compact spaces? What unique doors can the form of the short story open? The initial weeks will focus on exploratory exercises and the study of published short stories and craft essays. Later, student work will become the primary text as the focus shifts to workshop discussion. Authors on the syllabus will likely include Ted Chiang, Lauren Groff, Carmen Maria Machado, and Octavia Butler. This workshop welcomes writers of all levels of experience.
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a letter of introduction. I’d like to know a little about why you are drawn to studying fiction; what you hope to get out of the workshop and what you hope to contribute; and one thing you are passionate about outside writing / school. Please also include a very brief writing sample (2-3 pages). The sample can be in any genre (it does not have to be from a work of fiction).
Instructor: Claire Messud Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
This course approaches the writing of fiction with character at its center. If fiction is an exploration of what it’s like to be alive on the planet, character is paramount: we are who we are because of a combination temperament and experience. You can’t write convincingly if you don’t know your characters: plot, voice, detail, dialogue, setting – all these elements of story are interwoven with and dependent upon character. While it will be primarily a workshop of student fiction, we will read and discuss fiction through the lens of character – including works by Gustave Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Anton Chekhov, Brandon Taylor, Min Jin Lee, Ling Ma and Sidik Fofana.
Supplemental Application Information: Admission by application only. Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class. There is no prerequisite for this course. For your writing sample, please submit 2-5 pages of creative work in any genre.
Instructor: Neel Mukherjee Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
The course will consist of two halves. In the first hour of each class, we will be doing close readings of an assigned text, with the aim of isolating some concept or aspect of the genre under discussion in order to take bearings for your own. We will be reading authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Stanislav Lem, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, Kij Johnson, among others. We will be looking at questions of genre, and at the reasons for the quotation marks bracketing the word genre in the heading. We will also look at the convergences and divergences in the various kinds and modes mentioned in the title of the course. We will be thinking of generic topoi, conceptual underpinnings, imagination, style, world-building, storytelling, character, and resolution, among other things. Some of the best writing in these genres is by women on issues of gender and intersectionality, so there will also be a strong feminist component to the course. These genres have also been used, with extraordinary creativity and to great effect, by writers of colour to meditate on issues of race, inequality, oppression, freedom, so the syllabus also features an introduction to that domain.
In the second half of the class, divided into two equal segments of 55 minutes each, we will be workshopping the writing of two students. To this end, every week two students will hand in something they have written, to the tune of 2,500-5,000 words, to me and to everyone in the group, ideally one week before their turn. At our first meeting, I will circulate a rota for you to put down your names and walk you through the syllabus, the aims and objectives of the course, workshop rules, expectations, requirements etc. Our goal is for each of you to have two turns, and approximately 5-10,000 words of your work critiqued, by the time semester ends. Copies of these writing samples will be returned to you at the end of each workshop with comments from me and from everyone in class.
This is a workshop intended for intermediate to advanced students. Previous experience of Creative Writing workshops is helpful but not necessary. You will have to read a short story -- sometimes, quite long -- every week, and three novels over the course of the semester.
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit 3-5 pages of creative writing in prose (fiction is preferable, but non-fiction is also fine) along with a letter of introduction in which you write about why you’re interested in this course; what experience you’ve had writing; some of your favourite writers; what some of your favourite works of fiction are and why.
Instructor: Laura van den Berg TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
A promising draft is of little use to us as writers if we have no idea what to do next, of how to begin again. This course aims to illuminate how revision can be every bit as creative and exhilarating as getting the first draft down—and how time spent re-imagining our early drafts is the ultimate show of faith in our work. We will explore the art of revision—of realizing the promise of that first draft—through reading, craft discussion, exercises, and workshop. Students can expect to leave the semester with two polished short stories (or 40-50 polished novel pages), a keener understanding of their own writing process, and a plan for where to take their work next. Texts will include How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, Refuse to by Done by Matt Bell, and Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. It will be helpful to enter into the semester with some pre-existing material that you wish to revise (a short story, several chapters of a novel). Previous experience with workshopping writing is encouraged but not required.
Supplemental Application Information:Please submit a brief letter—1-2 pages—that discusses your interest in the course and in writing more broadly. What are you interested in working on and learning more about, at this point in your practice? Please also submit a short—2-3 page—writing sample (the first 2 pages of a short story or novel, for example).
An introductory workshop where we will learn to read as writers and study all aspects of the craft of fiction writing, including such topics as character, point of view, structure, time, and plot. The first weeks will focus on writing exercises and reading contemporary short fiction. As the semester progresses, the focus of the workshop will shift to creating and discussing your own work at the table.
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit ONLY a letter to me. I want to know what your favorite work of fiction is and why; and then tell me something you are passionate about and something you want to be better at; and, lastly, tell me why of all classes you want to take this one this semester. Please no writing samples.
Instructor: Valeria Luiselli Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
This is a course for anyone who is interested in the politics and aesthetics of sound. We will work on developing listening literacy as writers, thinking of it as a source of narrative craft. We will likewise explore listening as a collective practice that allows for intentional solidarity and creative resistance, both environmental and political. Some of our explorations will include: acoustemology, soundscaping, sound and gender, noise vs sound, archives and voices from the past, aural phenomenology, or the geophony-biophony-anthropophony triad. We will be engaging with a wide range of work from different fields, including: Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, Svetlana Alexievich, Layli Long Soldier, Fred Moten, Gloria Anzaldúa, Steven Feld, Roland Barthes, Arlette Farge, and the Ultra-red International Sound Collective.
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.
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.
Instructor: Louisa Thomas Tuesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
How does one tell -- vividly, interestingly -- the story of a life? How do we access a private life, or situate it in a public world? What if the subject is dead, or is famous, or is a dog, or is oneself? How do we ask the right questions in interviews, or know where to begin? This course will examine the art of writing narrative nonfiction about individual lives. We will read and discuss examples of profiles, biographies, and memoir/personal essays, paying special attention to structure, language, and style. We will also read and discuss each other’s work. Students are expected to produce (and to revise) two pieces of longform nonfiction writing. Readings by authors such as Hilton Als, Rachel Aviv, Robert Caro, Hermione Lee, Hua Hsu, and others.
Supplemental Application Information: To apply, please write a letter introducing yourself and explaining your interest in the course. Include a few examples of profiles, nonfiction books, or essays that you admire, along with a sentence or two explaining why. No other writing sample is required.
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
In this workshop-based course we will write about our personal lived experiences with loss and grief born from the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as how grief and grieving became a collective experience that is ongoing and persistent, like an afterimage or haunting. As part of our examination, we will consider intersections with other global, historical experiences and depictions of loss, including the murder of George Floyd and the AIDS epidemic. Readings will include essays by Leslie Jamison, Arundhati Roy, Susan Sontag, Eve Tuck and C. Ree, Matt Levin, and Alice Wong, among others.
Supplemental Application Information: Applications for this class should include a 3-5 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.
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Wednesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Barker 316 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
As memoirist and author Melissa Febos puts it: “The narrator is never you, and the sooner we can start thinking of ourselves on the page that way, the better for our work. That character on the page is just this shaving off of the person that was within a very particular context, intermingled with bits of perspective from all the time since — it’s a very specific little cocktail of pieces of the self and memory and art … it’s a very weird thing. And then it’s frozen in the pages.” With each essay and work of nonfiction we produce in this workshop-based class, the character we portray, the narrator we locate, is never stagnant, instead we are developing a persona, wrought from the experience of our vast selves and our vast experiences. To that end, in this course, you will use the tools and stylistic elements of creative nonfiction, namely fragmentation, narrative, scene, point of view, speculation, and research to remix and retell all aspects of your experience and selfhood in a multiplicity of ways. I will ask that you focus on a particular time period or connected events, and through the course of the semester, you will reimagine and reify these events using different modes and techniques as modeled in the published and various works we read. We will also read, in their entireties, Melissa Febos's Body Work: The Radical Work of Personal Narrative, as well as Hanif Abdurraqib’s TheyCan’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which will aid our discussions and help us to better understand the difference between persona(s) and the many versions of self that inhabit us.
Supplemental Application Information: Applications for this class should include a 3-5 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.
Instructor: Maggie Doherty Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Sever 205 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
This course is an overview of the creative nonfiction genre and the many different types of writing that are included within it: memoir, criticism, nature writing, travel writing, and more. Our readings will be both historical and contemporary: writers will include Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Audre Lorde, Hilton Als, and Carmen Maria Machado. During the first half of the semester, we will read two pieces closely; we will use our class discussions to analyze how these writers use pacing, character, voice, tone, and structure to tell their stories. Students will complete short, informal writing assignments during this part of the semester, based on the genre of work we’re discussing that week. During the second half of the semester, each student will draft and workshop a longer piece of creative nonfiction in the genre(s) of their choosing, which they will revise by the end of the semester. Students will be expected to provide detailed feedback on the work of their peers. This course is open to writers at all levels; no previous experience in creative writing is required.
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. You may also include writers or nonfiction works that you admire, as well as any themes or genres you'd like to experiment with in the course. Please also include a 3-5-page writing sample, ideally of some kind of creative writing (nonfiction is preferred, but fiction would also be acceptable). If you don't have a creative sample, you may submit a sample of your academic writing.
The essayist, the writer of non-fiction, has historically been an oracle of opinions that most often go unsaid. They do not traditionally reinforce a sense of insular collectivity, instead they often steer us towards a radical understanding of the moment that they write from. The best essayists unearth and organize messages from those most at the margins: the ignored, the exiled, the criminal, and the destitute. So, by writing about these people, the essayist is fated, most nobly or just as ignobly, to write about the ills and aftermaths of their nation’s worse actions. It is an obligation and also a very heavy burden.
In this class we will examine how the essay and many essayists have functioned as geographers of spaces that have long been forgotten. And we read a series of non-fiction pieces that trouble the question of interiority, belonging, the other, and outsiderness. And we will attempt to do a brief but comprehensive review of the essay as it functions as a barometer of the author’s times. This will be accomplished by reading the work of such writers as: Herodotus, William Hazlitt, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Gay Talese, Binyavanga Wainaina, Jennifer Clement, V.S. Naipaul, Sei Shonagon, George Orwell, Ha Jin, Margo Jefferson, Simone White, and Joan Didion. This reading and discussion will inform our own writing practice as we write essays.
Everyone who is interested in this class should feel free to apply.
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class.
Instructor: Josh Bell Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
Initially, students can expect to read, discuss, and imitate the strategies of a wide range of poets writing in English; to investigate and reproduce prescribed forms and poetic structures; and to engage in writing exercises meant to expand the conception of what a poem is and can be. As the course progresses, reading assignments will be tailored on an individual basis, and an increasing amount of time will be spent in discussion of student work.
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a portfolio including a letter of interest, ten poems, and a list of classes (taken at Harvard or elsewhere) that seem to have bearing on your enterprise.
Instructor: Tracy K. Smith Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
What can a poem achieve when it contemplates or even emulates a work of art in another medium? In this workshop, we'll read and write poems that engage with other art forms--and we'll test out what a foray into another artistic practice allows us to carry back over into the formal methods and behaviors of poetry. With poems by Keats, Rilke, Auden, Hughes, and Brooks, as well as Kevin Young, Evie Shockley, Ama Codjoe and other contemporary voices.
Instructor: Tracy K. Smith Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Sever 112 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
In this workshop, we’ll look closely at the craft-based choices poets make, and track the effects they have upon what we as readers are made to think and feel. How can implementing similar strategies better prepare us to engage the questions making up our own poetic material? We’ll also talk about content. What can poetry reveal about the ways our interior selves are shaped by public realities like race, class, sexuality, injustice and more?
Instructor: Josh Bell Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. Course Site
By guided reading, classroom discussion, one on one conference, and formal and structural experimentation, members of the Advanced Poetry Workshop will look to hone, deepen, and challenge the development of their poetic inquiry and aesthetic. Students will be required to write and submit one new poem each week and to perform in-depth, weekly critiques of their colleagues' work.
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a portfolio including a letter of interest, ten poems, and a list of classes (taken at Harvard or elsewhere) that seem to have bearing on your enterprise.
Instructor: Sam Marks TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
This workshop is an introduction to writing for the stage through intensive reading and in-depth written exercises. Each student will explore the fundamentals and possibilities of playwriting by generating short scripts and completing a one act play with an eye towards both experimental and traditional narrative styles. Readings will examine various ways of creating dramatic art and include work from contemporary playwrights such as Ayad Aktar, Clare Barron, Aleshea Harris, Young Jean Lee, and Taylor Mac, as well established work from Edward Albbe, Caryl Churchill, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Harold Pinter.
Supplemental Application Information: No experience in writing the dramatic form is necessary. Please submit a 5-10 page writing sample (preferably a play or screenplay, but all genres are acceptable and encouraged). Also, please write a few sentences about a significant theatrical experience (a play read or seen) and how it affected you.
Instructor: Musa Syeed Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site
The short film, with its relatively lower costs of production and expanded distribution opportunities, has become one of the most disruptive, innovative modes of storytelling--and is often an emerging filmmaker's first step into a career. This course will introduce students to the basics of short form screenwriting, including narrative theory/structure, character design, and dialogue/voice. In the first quarter of the semester, we will hone dramatic techniques through several craft exercise assignments and in-class writing. In the following weeks, students will write two short screenplays. Throughout the semester, we will be workshopping and doing table reads of student work, discussing screenplays and craft texts, and screening a wide array of short films. The emphasis will be on discovering a sense of personal voice and completing two short screenplays (under 20 pages).
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class. You may comment on what films/filmmakers inspire you and what kind of subject matter you may be interested to write about. For your writing sample, please submit 3-5 pages of your creative work from any genre (screenwriting, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc.)
Instructor: Jesse McCarthy Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 211 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
We begin with Steven S. Lee’s 2015 book, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, a study of the relation between minority writers and the Soviet Union. How can this model apply to other minority vanguardist literatures? What is or what was the avant-garde? How should we read that phrase today? Recent debates in Black Studies over temporality, periodization, affect, and antagonism, suggest that we may not have an adequate theory of the avant-garde, or at least we may need to update the ones we inherit from Renato Poggioli (1968) and Peter Bürger (1984) in their accounts of the historical formation of European vanguards. By revisiting the avant-garde, we renew a concept that touches on a wealth of topics of interest to contemporary theoretical and methodological debates: taste, politics, publics and counter-publics, signifying, archives, transnationalism, translation, incompleteness, failure, and the circulation and manipulation of new medias. There are also the classic questions: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "avant-garde" or avant-gardes? What is the relationship between avant-garde artistic movements and political or militant ones? This course will explore these themes comparatively, with readings drawn from poems, plays, novels, films, and ranging widely across the African diaspora, South and East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This is a graduate seminar and will typically only admit graduate students; undergraduate students may apply for special permission in writing but admittance will be strictly limited.
Jakob Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance invented the self has been vigorously challenged, but it gets at something that happened in the representation of personal identity first in Italy in the 14th century and then throughout the rest of Europe. This course will consider several of the writers whose self-representations have long drawn critical attention– More, Elizabeth I, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton – but now accompanied by such figures as Mary Sidney, George Gascoigne, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Carew, Francis Bacon, Anne Clifford, and Margaret Cavendish. The English examples will be set alongside key figures in the European Renaissance: Petrarch in Italy, Montaigne in France, and Cervantes in Spain. Students will be encouraged not only to reach out to a broad range of geographical possibilities but also to cast a wide cultural net (so as to include, for example, Osman of Timisoara or Glickl of Hameln). As represented in such works as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Michel de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun, inquisitorial inquiries and witchcraft testimonies will also fall within the range of ego-documents that we will investigate. The seminar will be coordinated with a related course in the Art History Department taught by Professor Joseph Koerner, so that textual representations of the self will be set alongside a wide array of comparable representations in the visual arts. A central question will be the relationship between words and pictures in the fashioning of identity.... Read more about English 226s. Renaissance Ego-Documents
Instructor: Nicholas Watson Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
A study of a series of visionary works written between the thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, including Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, John of Morigny's Book of Flowers, Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. We read these works as contrasting products of a particular (and time-limited) conception of the imagination as an instrument of human perception and its affordances and dangers as this conception meets ancient traditions of writing about the validity or otherwise of dreams and of spiritual, or perhaps corporeal, descents into hell and/or ascents to heaven. We consider the inter-relationship between the poetic and the visionary in light of the categories of "orthodoxy" and "discretion of spirits" during a period when both were fiercely contested. We also consider visionary writing as a precursor of the concept of the "fictional" and of the novel, with particular reference to W. G. Sebald's 2001 novel Austerlitz.
Space permitting, this course is open to qualified undergraduates. Please contact Prof. Watson before classes begin if you would like to take the course.
Instructor: Elaine Scarry Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
Approaches Hardy's novels, stories, and narrative poems through the language of the senses (hearing, vision, touch) and through moral agency (philosophic essays on "luck'' and "action'').
Open to upper-level undergraduates with permission of instructor.
Instructor: Martin Puchner Monday, 9:45-11:451m | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
Public humanities are becoming increasingly central for careers both inside and outside of academia. This workshop, which is open to beginning and advanced graduate students, introduces participants to the tools they need to address audiences other than specialists in their own field. These tools range from writing op-eds based on dissertation research to writing general interest books, and also include book reviews, podcasts, social media strategies and more. While we will discuss some historical context, the emphasis is on practice and skills. Our work will be supplemented by visits from editors and literary agents.
Instructor: Kelly Mee Rich Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
This course addresses the role of the archive in literary and cultural studies. It examines the debates, theories, and methods that emerge in relation to archival research, particularly around issues of memory, recovery, access, materiality, and the relationship between research and researcher. The syllabus includes units on power and history, bodies and affect, reading along or against the grain, photography and mediation, colonial archives, the Black Atlantic, and human rights. Assignments are designed to encourage students to a) consider the influence of archival encounters in their specific field and/or discipline; b) develop relationships with local archives and greater orientation in such literary institutions; and c) reflect on how the archive might bear on their approach to literary study.This seminar is open to all graduate students in the arts and humanities.
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.
Instructor: Homi Bhabha TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Narrative Negotiations explores narrative “voice” in a wide range of literary and cultural texts. Narrative voice is a lively dialogue between the author and the reader as they engage in the experience of determining the value and veracity of the narrative: whose story is it anyway? The writer creates the imaginative universe of character, plot, emotions and ideas—she seems to be holding all the cards; but it is the reader who rolls the dice as she draws on her human experience and moral values to question the principles and priorities of the storyteller. The game of narrative becomes deadly serious when storytelling confronts issues of colonialism, slavery, racial profiling and gender discrimination. Is the right to narrative restricted to those who have suffered the injustices of exclusion? What is my responsibility as a storyteller—or a reader—if I am a witness to violence, or an advocate against injustice, but my life-story is one of privilege, protection and security? What is the role of the politics of identity or cultural appropriation in determining whose story is it anyway? Throughout the seminar students will be encouraged to draw on their own histories, memories and literary experiences as the enter into the world of the prescribed readings. For the final assessment I hope students will choose critical and creative ways of telling their own stories, or the stories of others who have captured their imaginations. Seminar participants will be required to come to each class with two questions that pose issues or problems based on the texts that are important for them, and may prove to be significant for their colleagues. I will invite members of the group to pose their questions and start a discussion.
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: Christopher Pexa TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
What are Native American and Indigenous literatures, and how might we best understand their/our relationship to U.S. and Canadian national literatures? How may we read Native American and Indigenous literatures as asserting both critiques of the United States, Canada, and other settler colonial nations, as well as asserting longstanding forms of Indigenous peoplehood, nationhood, and sovereignty? This seminar attempts to answer such questions by examining Native American and Indigenous writers’ imaginings of resistance, survival, and political and cultural resurgence over roughly 250 years, from the early American colonial period to the present. We will approach all of our readings from the perspectives of Indigeneity, nationhood, kinship, sovereignty, settler colonialism, and decolonization, among others, in a constant endeavor to refine and apply these terms. Note: that while we will take a mostly chronological approach, our inquiry will hardly be exhaustive but instead will concentrate heavily on recent authors and texts.
