Spring Term 2024
Course Information
Common Courses
English 20. Literary Forms
Instructor: Deidre Shauna Lynch
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 27 students
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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
Section 1 Instructor: Daniel Donoghue
Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
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Section 2 Instructor: Sarah Dimick
Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for meetings times & location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
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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.
Lecture Courses
English 103d. Beowulf and Seamus Heaney
Instructor: Joseph A. Shack
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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Translations of excerpts from Beowulf will proceed in parallel with careful reading of Heaney's verse translation. Questions concerning translation theory will emerge from the comparison of in-class efforts with Heaney's and other versions. What is the relation between translation and interpretation? How does Heaney's Beowulf compare with the body of poetry he has produced over the decades? The course begins with a review of grammar.
Recommended Preparation: English 102.
Note: Students who complete both English 102 and 103 with honors grades will fulfill the College language requirement and the English Department’s Foreign Literature requirement.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 115b. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Instructor: Anna Wilson
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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What makes stories so pleasurable and revealing but also so enraging and dangerous? How are we to think about the strong emotions they evoke and learn to resist as well as appreciate their power? This course revisits Geoffrey Chaucer's classic fourteenth-century poem, The Canterbury Tales: the deepest and most caustically entertaining analysis of storytelling ever written. The Canterbury Tales consists of a series of tales told by members of a pilgrimage on their way from London to Canterbury, representatives of the internally divided social world of Chaucer’s England. Some are serious, others funny, obscene, or offensive; some are religious, others not at all; some deal with issues local to England, others range across the Europe and the rest of the known world; many are told against other pilgrims. Written in a long-ago past, the poem jumps off the page, in turns unrecognisably weird and startlingly modern. We read the poem in the language in which it was written, Middle English, easy and fun to learn with early help: no previous experience with the language, or with the medieval era, is necessary. We will also explore the poem's long-ranging impact on English literature, including several contemporary reimaginings. Classes include a short lecture on a tale, and class discussion, which continues in weekly sections. Course projects include an essay, a collaborative report on one tale, and a creative option. Students of all years and from all concentrations and programs are welcome. If you are a graduate student interested in taking this class, please contact Prof. Wilson to indicate interest before term begins; there may be an additional graduate section if there is sufficient demand.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 124sg. Sex, Gender, and Shakespeare
Instructor: Alan Niles
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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This class is an introduction to Shakespeare’s writings and their representations of sex, gender, romance, love, and queerness. We will study poems about erotic and queer desire, plays that stage ideas about gender and gender fluidity, and film adaptations that bring modern perspectives to race and sexuality. Readings will include such plays as Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure; Shakespeare’s Sonnets; and films by Derek Jarman, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Julie Taymor. Prior experience reading Shakespeare may be helpful but is not expected. Throughout our course, we will ask: how are the forms of gender identity and sexual expression we encounter in Shakespeare’s works familiar, or different? How might they challenge, inspire, or disturb us today?
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 131p. Milton's Paradise Lost
Instructor: Gordon Teskey
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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This course focuses on Milton’s most famous work, Paradise Lost, the greatest long poem in English and the only successful classical epic in the modern world. Milton went totally blind in his forties and composed Paradise Lost by reciting verses to anyone available to take them down, like the blind prophets and poets of legend. Yet the moral and political questions he raised—what is the human? what is gender? what is the political? what is religion? what is dissent? what is legitmacy? what is revolt?—are surprisingly enduring and modern. His own solutions to these questions may not be ours, but his abilility to provoke thought on them speaks to our time. We will consider how Milton generates the sublime and how he builds great scenes and characters, especially his most famous one, Satan.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 151an. The Age of the Novel
Instructor: Tara K. Menon
Monday & Wednesday, 9:00-10:15 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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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 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 five 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 adaptations and read excerpts of contemporary criticism and fiction to better understand the enduring legacy of these canonical works. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 152kd. Keats Isn't Dead: How We Live Romanticism
Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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Our thoughts and feelings about identity, self-expression, and the power of the imagination draw on the British Romantic poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century—whether we've read any or not. Focusing on John Keats (his key poems, and his key ideas, about "negative capability", the "camelion poet", and so on), this course makes unconventional connections into the twentieth, and twenty-first century. Tracking issues of race, class, gender and sexuality, we'll bounce from Keats into war verse; African-American poetries; world/postcolonial writing; the literature of social class; feminist experimentalism; and constructions of masculinity. Concentrators will learn how to analyze poetry in both closed and open forms.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 160je. The Joyce Effect
Instructor: Beth Blum
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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Speaking of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot confessed: “I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it.” How does one write literature after Joyce’s revolutionary prose? This course explores different authors’ responses to that challenge. You will be introduced to one of the most influential authors of the 20th century through selected readings from Joyce’s key works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake (excerpts). After immersing ourselves in Joyce’s oeuvre, we will track its afterlife in literature (Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith), graphic narrative (Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel), and popular culture.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 172ad. American Democracy
Instructor: John Stauffer and Roberto Unger
Tuesday, 1:00-3:00 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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Democracy, inequality, and nationalism in America. The white working class and American politics. Class and race. Identities and interests. Conditions for socially inclusive economic growth and for the deepening and dissemination of the knowledge economy. Alternative directions of institutional change, viewed in light of American history. Democratizing the market and deepening democracy. Self-reliance and solidarity.
We explore and discuss the past, present, and especially the future of the American experiment among ourselves and with invited guests: thinkers, politicians, social activists, and entrepreneurs.
Readings drawn from classic and contemporary writings about the United States.
Note: This course is cross-listed with HLS 2955 and HDS.
English 173bl. The Black Lyric
Instructor: Tracy K. Smith
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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African American poets have long embraced the private freedoms of the lyric poem—freedom to claim the authority of an uncontested first person “I”; freedom to wrangle language into new and startling forms; freedom to depart as needed from the strictures of linear reality. And yet, from its earliest iterations, African American poetry has also concerned itself with correcting and complicating the official narrative of Black life and Black subjectivity in America. This course will explore the means by which Black poets have innovated upon the lyric tradition to accommodate a sense of allegiance to a collective. In this tradition, the lyric poem has become a powerful tool with which to ponder the dynamics of self and other, intimate and political—and justice and injustice. Course readings will include work by seminal 20th Century American figures such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton, as well as contemporary voices like Jericho Brown, Tyehimba Jess, Morgan Parker, Eve L. Ewing and others. We will also devote attention to lyric corollaries in film, music, visual art and performance. Students will be encouraged to respond to course themes and texts in both critical and creative form.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 176tm. Toni Morrison
Instructor: Namwali Serpell
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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This course is a survey of the work of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, including most of her novels, a few nonfiction essays, and a short story. We will consider her literary antecedents; follow her influence on contemporaries and future writers; trace the social, historical, and political contexts and implications of her work; and explore the critical interventions she made in historiography and literary criticism. Throughout, we will focus on Morrison’s rich and complex aesthetic project: how it came into being; how it resonates with a great range of philosophical questions from epistemology to ethics; and how it changed over time.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 178x. The American Novel: Dreiser to the Present
Instructor: Philip Fisher
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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A survey of the 20th-century novel, its forms, patterns of ideas, techniques, cultural context, rivalry with film and radio, short story, and fact. Wharton, Age of Innocence; Cather, My Antonia; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and stories; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and stories; Ellison, Invisible Man; Nabokov, Lolita; Robinson, Housekeeping; Salinger, Catcher in the Rye and stories; Ha Jin, Waiting; Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station. Stories by James, London, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gaitskill, Wallace, Beattie, Lahiri, and Ford.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 180vw. Two Visionary Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Company
Instructor: Nicholas Watson
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
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Julian of Norwich (born 1343) and Margery Kempe of Lynn (born 1373) are the two earliest women writers in English whose names we know. They lived thirty years and thirty miles apart, met only once over a period of some days, and wrote long, completely different books, both inspired by what they understood as visionary encounters with the divine. Julian was a Christian intellectual, a brilliant writer, intensely visual but also abstract, who spent a lifetime writing and rewriting an intricate and optimistic analysis of how to live as an aspiring and suffering human being in the world that many people around the world still live by. Margery (she did not much like her husband’s name) was a religious experimentalist, devout globe-trotter and performance artist, equally brilliant, whose energies seemed to have gone into living more than writing, but who in old age dictated then revised what many understand as the first English autobiography. After being mostly ignored for several hundred years, they are now being read with care, although by different readerships and in different ways. It is time they were brought together again.
In this discussion-based course, we read the versions of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love and The Book of Margery Kempe closely alongside one another, as well as in the light of passages from other women writers who drew, or may have drawn, inspiration from visions, revelations, and dreams, from the early Christian martyr Perpetua of Carthage in the third century CE to the reclusive New England poet Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth. We consider how it was that revelations were able to make an innovative, demanding and prestigious mode of thought and writing possible for women who were excluded by their gender from the formal education available to male contemporaries. We think about what revelations are, how they function as an embodied, kinetic, and dialogic mode of consciousness, and the stylistic and intellectual experimentation this mode of consciousness enables. We speculate on potential connections between the visionary and other non-natural ways of seeing the world, such as through the thing we call “fiction,” this last with the help of a novel by Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, where Julian makes a brief appearance. Finally, we consider the excruciating difficulty of being and writing as a visionary and the cultural and psychic pressures the role of visionary involved and involves. Although the main setting of the course is the world of Julian and Margery, we do not forget that we are reading them in the now.
Note: This course is a limited-enrollment seminar open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 183ts. Taylor Swift and Her World
Instructor: Stephanie Burt
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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The first song on Taylor Swift's first record, released when she was 16, paid homage (by name) to a more established country artist. Today she's the most recognizable country-- or formerly country? or pop?-- artist in North America, if not the world: her songwriting takes in half a dozen genres, and her economic impact changes cities. We will move through Swift's own catalogue, including hits, deep cuts, outtakes, re-recordings, considering songwriting as its own art, distinct from poems recited or silently read. We will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts. We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure. We will look at her precursors, from Dolly Parton to the Border Ballads, and at work about her (such as the documentary "Miss Americana"). And we will read literary works important to her and works about song and performance, with novels, memoirs and poems by (among others) Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson, Tracey Thorn, and William Wordsworth.
English 185e. The Essay: History and Practice
Instructor: James Wood
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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Matthew Arnold famously said that poetry is, at bottom, “a criticism of life.” But if any literary form is truly a criticism of life, it is the essay. And yet despite the fact that all students write essays, most students rarely study them; bookshops and libraries categorize such work only negatively, by what it is not: “non-fiction.” At the same time, the essay is at present one of the most productive and fertile of literary forms. It is practiced as memoir, reportage, diary, criticism, and sometimes all four at once. Novels are becoming more essayistic, while essays are borrowing conventions and prestige from fiction. This class will disinter the essay from its comparative academic neglect, and examine the vibrant contemporary borderland between the reported and the invented. We will study the history of the essay, from Montaigne to the present day. Rather than study that history purely chronologically, each class will group several essays from different decades and centuries around common themes: death, detail, sentiment, race, gender, photography, the flaneur, witness, and so on. In addition to writing about essays – writing critical essays about essays – students will also be encouraged to write their own creative essays: we will study the history of the form, and practice the form itself. Essayists likely to be studied: Montaigne, De Quincey, Woolf, Benjamin, Orwell, Primo Levi, Barthes, Baldwin, Sontag, Didion, Leslie Jamison, Hanif Abdurraqib, Helen Garner, Cathy Park Hong.
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, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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“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.
English 187x. Twentieth Century American Poetry
Instructor: Peter Sacks
Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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A study of selected American poetry, mostly published after 1945. Authors include Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, James Wright, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Yusef Komunyakaa, others, Focus on history, voice, politics, crisis, survival.
For Spring 2024, the class will be remote only. Discussion sections will be in person.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 189vg. Video Game Storytelling
Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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Although this course does discuss blockbuster games, it’s primarily concerned with indie titles prioritizing discovery over system mastery—asking us to think differently. Drawing on video game scholars—Melissa Kagen, Brendan Keogh, Ian Bogost—we’ll examine the gendered deconstruction of horror-codes in Gone Home (described by Brigid Kennedy as “an explicitly queer videogame with an explicitly queer narrative”); the interplay between the singular and the shareable in the trans micro-narrative, Dys4ia; and consider how Return of the Obra Dinn uses retrospective plotting to query a purely economic view of the world. We’ll also discuss Firewatch, The Stanley Parable, Stray and Stardew Valley among other games, and consider how this art form, better than any other, probes the division identified by Theodor Adorno within capitalist society, separating “work” from leisure, or “play”. At the Bok Center Learning Lab, you’ll sample games on multiple platforms and discover tools for creating game stories (engines like Unity, input devices, and storyboards).
English 195bd. The Dark Side of Big Data
Instructor: Maria Dikcis
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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Does it sometimes feel like Instagram ads are listening a little too closely to your conversations? Have you ever wondered if certain corporations might own images of your face? Today, fears abound that algorithms are not only populating our lives with annoying targeted advertisements but might also be creating the most unequal societies that have ever existed. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore key methodological overlaps and differences between humanistic and scientific approaches to the phenomenon known as Big Data, or enormously large data sets that are analyzed by computer software to reveal patterns associated with human behavior and communications. In particular, we will focus our attention on the dark side of Big Data, which is increasingly embedded with harmful biases against women, people of color, immigrants, and low-socioeconomic status communities. Our inquires will thus concern a wide array of issues that stem from the misapplication of Big Data, such as data discrimination, biased artificial intelligence, search engines that reinforce racism, predictive policing, and surveillance capitalism, as well as how these issues intersect with race, class, gender, and citizenship. We will ground these discussions about contemporary theories of Big Data in engagements with a number of literary texts, films, and new media artworks. These cultural case studies range from a poetry collection exploring anti-Blackness and the carceral state, a documentary on social media data scandals, a glitch feminism manifesto, a memoir about working at an Amazon.com fulfillment center, queer video games, and robot love poems.
GENED 1186. The Age of Anxiety: Histories, Theories, Remedies
Instructor: Beth Blum
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Course Site
How have authors throughout history channeled anxiety into meaningful and imaginative works of art?
The poet WH Auden described the 1940s as “the age of anxiety,” but he could have been describing our own stress-ridden times: anxiety is today the most common class of contemporary mental health condition. This course pursues two guiding questions: how has anxiety changed throughout history and how has it stayed the same? And how have authors throughout history productively channeled anxiety into creating beautiful and meaningful works of art? Through a combination of readings and fieldwork, we’ll investigate anxiety’s potential causes, from the universal fear of death to the more historical contexts of urbanization and self-optimization, for instance, as well as its various treatments, such as stoicism, self-help, and psychopharmacology. The course combines practical and theoretical perspectives to examine the relation between anxiety and creativity and to engage with various aesthetic responses—from comedy to literature and film—to the troubles of being that anxiety designates. Smaller weekly assignments will include slow reading, technological unplugging, and proposing one improvement to the mental health culture on campus. Final project may be scholarly, creative, or a hybrid of both. Students will emerge from class readings and discussions with an understanding of anxiety as a social formation, literary preoccupation, and, when harnessed, a spur to aesthetic invention and political intervention.
Humanities 10b. A Humanities Colloquium: From James Joyce to Homer
Instructors: David Elmer, Namwali Serpell, David Armitage, Glenda Carpio, Tara K. Menon, Kelly Mee Rich
Tuesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
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2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10b will likely include works by Homer, Sappho, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Austen, Du Bois and Joyce, along with the Book of Genesis. 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 who have completed Humanities 10a. 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.
Undergraduate Seminars
AFRAMER 55. Ishmael Reed: Novels, Poetry, Essays
Instructor: Glenda Carpio
Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
Ishmael Reed is one of the most prolific, long-practicing and controversial African American writers. A novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, editor, and publisher who has often battled the literary establishment, Reed has been active since the 1960s. This course explores his work against the backdrop of late 20th century African American literary practices.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 90b. James/Baldwin
Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
At first glance Henry James and James Baldwin may seem worlds apart. Yet these two enormously influential writers share much in common. Both are New Yorkers; both spent a good deal of their lives as expatriates; both are celebrated for their queerness, a feature of their style as much as their sexuality. Both were serious, moralizing, and passionate observers of the "American Scene"; both writers are deeply committed to investigating and exploring the privacy of consciousness and the currency of experience. Henry James was James Baldwin’s favorite writer. Colm Tóibín has called Baldwin, “the Henry James of Harlem.” What attracted Baldwin to James across their vast racial and class differences? What lessons about the art of fiction can we learn by reading each in the light of the other? Not only the Jamesian influence on Baldwin—but what Baldwin allows us to see might be missing or muted in James. We will think very closely about the subject that deeply occupied both of them: America. And what America means from perspectives acquired from outside of America, looking back in. We will also investigate the expression and communication of sexuality, gender, race, class, money, politics and taste alongside assorted criticism, reviews, and other essays of interest.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 90d. Literature and Disability
Instructor: Marc Shell
Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
How has literature influenced the rhetoric and philosophy of disability? This seminar considers literary and cinematic works that focus on the body (deafness, blindness, and paralysis), the mind (madness and trauma), and language (muteness, stuttering, and dyslexia). Special attention to the disabling and enabling aftermaths of pandemics and to the effects of modern prostheses. Readings include chapters from the King James Bible and works by Brecht, Hitchcock, Keller, Martineau, Milton, Morrison, Shakespeare, Shaw, and Trumbo.
English 90er. Poetry, Creatures, the Earth
Instructor: Peter Sacks
Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
How has poetry served as one of the most powerful means by which to express the increasingly fraught relation between humans, other creatures, and the planet? From celebration, to warning, to grief and outrage, the poems in this course cover several centuries and cultures. Authors include Shakespeare, Keats, Thomas, Hopkins, Moore, Bishop, Mandelstam, Walcott and others.
For Spring 2024, the class will be remote only.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 90id. U.S. Immigrant Drama
Instructor: Maria de Simone
Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
Through the reading and viewing of plays, students analyze how theatre illuminates cultural, racial, and legal perspectives on the immigrant experience in the United States. The course is organized chronologically, starting with the dramatic literature of the early twentieth century and concluding with the recent production (2023) of “Sanctuary City” by Martyna Majok. We will explore stories by and about immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ireland, China, Japan, Cuba, Mexico, and Vietnam, among others.
Discussions will unpack how theatre reflects, challenges, and re-constructs the idea of the “American immigrant.” Topics will include cultural appropriation, reclamation, and discovery; assimilation and passing; stereotyping and identity affirmation. In this course, theatre brings into view how identity dichotomies (foreign vs citizen, immigrant vs resident, first-generation vs second-generation, racial minority vs racial majority) have shaped immigrant subjectivities in the U.S. Ultimately, the plays we engage contest monolithic conceptions of the “immigrant” and the way in which foreignness and migration have impacted understandings of citizenship and racial belonging in the United States.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 90ji. Not Vanishing: Indigenous Literary Theory and Criticism
Instructor: Daniel Heath Justice
Thursday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
The past forty years have seen significant methodological and theoretical shifts in the scholarly field of Indigenous literary studies, moving from ethnographically inflected outsider analyses of culture and identity or as extensions of nation-state literatures to Indigenous-grounded concerns of peoplehood, land, language, and sovereignty in intellectual and artistic production. The range of literary forms, genres, issues, and regions represented in the scholarship has increased dramatically as well, as has attention to Indigenous voices in the archive, becoming more intentionally international in scope, culturally specific in concern, and expansive in consideration of genre and form across time and space. The demographics of the field have changed, too, now centring Indigenous thinkers among the field’s major theorists and recognizing imaginative experimentation alongside continuity of Indigenous traditions and grounded knowledge. This course offers a focused analysis of significant histories, archives, methods, and conversations in Indigenous literary studies, with particular emphasis on the field’s intellectual and creative genealogies.
English 90lt. Theory Matters: Problems in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory
Instructor: Homi Bhabha
Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
Why study literary theory? Is theory a conceptual framework or a tool-kit? Is theory a companion to literary study or is it crucial for literary interpretation? These are some of the questions I propose to address in this seminar which will address literary and cultural problems that have been shaped by theoretical concerns and concepts. This course will not adopt a historical approach nor will it be a survey of “schools” of literary theory. The syllabus will focus on topics such as Power, Race, Identity, Sexuality, Environmentalism, Postcolonialism, Inequality, Poverty etc. etc. and trace theoretical contributions that have been formative in shaping the diverse discourses around these issues. . Aesthetic, political and ethical approaches will be knotted together in our conversations. The seminar will be concerned with the relation between cultural form and cultural value. Literary texts will be used in conjunction with theoretical works.
English 90mr. Race and Religion in Medieval Literature
Instructor: Anna Wilson
Tuesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
This course focuses on representations of race, religion, and cross-cultural contact in literature written in western Europe between approximately 800 and 1450 CE, before colonial contact with the Americas. During this period, diplomats, pilgrims, and merchants crisscrossed Europe and Asia, generating fascination with far-away lands and a booming trade in exotic goods; Christian kingdoms of western Europe formed uneasy alliances under the banner of a shared religion to invade Muslim territories and sack Jewish communities in the Crusades; and a global pandemic spread via fleas on ship rats, killing hundreds of thousands and fomenting xenophobic violence. We will read texts from a variety of genres, including religious plays, romances about inter-faith marriage, chansons de geste (poems celebrating deeds in war, often grotesquely violent), and ‘armchair travel’ guides. We will trace the emergence of modern concepts of race and ethnicity in the way medieval Christian writers represented religious difference in/as bodily difference; develop a critical, historically-situated toolkit for analysing medieval concepts and terms around race, ethnicity, and nation; and analyse the role of the middle ages in current conversations about race in America.
This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 90pr. Performing Criticism
Instructor: David Levine
Wednesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
What makes “Great Criticism?” Analytic clarity? A surfeit of objectivity? Dedication to art and artists? Or is great criticism more like great art, relying on a strong point of view and deep personal investment? This course tests the latter view, by treating canonical works of criticism as dramatic monologues to be analyzed, invested with desire, and performed. Who were these critics? Why did they feel such an urgent need to speak? We'll use script analysis to pay closer attention to how arguments are constructed, and acting techniques to listen closely for the ways that criticism is always, to quote Nietzsche, “the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography”
This course will range through the history of criticism and theory, with special attention to literature, philosophy, and art history. Students will learn fundamental techniques of scene analysis, acting, and public speaking. The course will culminate in a durational performance at Harvard Art Museums, occupying the entire building.
This is a hybrid seminar/studio class, with academic and performance components. No previous experience of either is required, although a readiness to immerse yourself in both is expected.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 90rq. Bold Bodies: Race in Feminist & Queer Performance
Instructor: Maria de Simone
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site
This course offers feminist/queer, minoritarian, and comparative perspectives to the study of race in performance. We will define minoritarian aesthetics in both content and style, underscoring the practices that remake the world from minor voices. This course understands theatre and performance as crucial for personal and community expression, political activism, and survival.
We will explore a variety of representation and performance techniques from the last sixty years—theatre and drama, modern dance, performance art, fashion, film, and music—from geographical areas including but not limited to the United States. Performances and theories will spur discussions on topics such as body politics and sexualities, representation and spectatorship, understandings of race, and uses/limitations of performance in feminist/queer activism. This course will broaden students’ perspectives on what performance can do to advance racial and social justice through the subversive voices of minoritarian subjects.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
English 90t. Toxic Rhetoric
Instructor: Sarah Dimick
Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for meetings times & location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmworkers Union, both campaigned against toxic exposures in the mid-20th-century United States and yet are rarely considered in tandem. This course puts the writings and activism of these two women in conversation, ranging through feminist, queer, and Latinx environmental writing to build connections between environmentalism and labor rights. Our study focuses on the craft of environmental nonfiction writing, examining contemporary practitioners working in the vein of Carson and Huerta. Students will also compose environmental nonfiction, employing the literary techniques analyzed in this course to craft a narrative addressing exposure, toxins, or the state of public health.
Authors include: Rachel Carson, Dolores Huerta, Helena María Viramontes, and Cherríe Moraga.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Undergraduate Tutorials
Creative Writing Workshops
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
Playwriting
Screenwriting
Graduate Seminars
AFRAMER 202. Theory and Race in the Americas
Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Mondays, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
This course surveys myths, theories, discourses, and debates surrounding the meaning of race and its role in the historical formation of the “New World” in the Americas. Beginning with the origins of racial theory in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, we will follow their evolution and expansion into scientific and culturalist discourses in the nineteenth century, and through the dramatic transformations of the twentieth century leading up to the present. Readings will range from canonical scholars, orators, social scientists, and philosophers up to the most contemporary thinkers. Along the way, we will read work by Ottobah Cugoano, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Hortense Spillers, Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Denise Ferreira da Silva, James Baldwin, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, Imani Perry, Khalil Muhammad, Saidiya Hartman, Charles Mills, Jackie Wang, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Audre Lorde and Cornel West among others. The course places an emphasis on building foundations in the historiography and intellectual genealogy of racial discourses as they have been constructed, reproduced, contested, reimagined, and ultimately disseminated throughout the American hemisphere and beyond.
English 239. English Literature and the Continental Renaissance
Instructor: Leah Whittington
Mondays, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
A study of English writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in relation to the international cultural movement of the European Renaissance, with an emphasis on changing attitudes towards the Renaissance project of reviving the classical past.
English 276x. African-American Literary Tradition
Instructor: Henry Louis Gate, Jr.
Tuesdays, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
An exploration of the emergence and development of the African-American literary "tradition'' from the 18th to the 20th century. Close reading of the canonical texts in the tradition, and their structural relationships are stressed.
English 281p. What Are Poetries? Lyric and other poetry and poetics in English since 1850
Instructor: Stephanie Burt
Thursday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
This is a course for graduates and ambitious undergraduates about how we have understood lyric and other kinds of poetry over the past 150+ years, with poets, poems and their reception coming first, and theories (or theory) afterwards. Likely poets: Whitman, Moore, Williams, Hughes, O'Hara, Baxter, Baker, Hayes, Riley, Chen and others.
English 290mh. Migration and the Humanities
Instructor: Homi Bhabha
Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
By focusing on literary narratives, cultural representations, and critical theories, this course explores ways in which issues related to migration create rich and complex interdisciplinary conversations. How do humanistic disciplines address these issues—human rights, cultural translation, global justice, security, citizenship, social discrimination, biopolitics—and what contributions do they make to the “home” disciplines of migration studies such as law, political science, and sociology? How do migration narratives compel us to revise our concepts of culture, polity, neighborliness, and community? We will explore diverse aspects of migration from existential, ethical, and philosophical perspectives while engaging with specific regional and political histories.
Note: Cannot be taken for credit if ROM-STD 290 already complete.
English 293b. Book Theory
Instructor: Deidre Shauna Lynch
Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
In this seminar we will work our way through theoretical work presenting the Western book as, variously, medium, interface, commodity, technology (including technology of empire), storage device, and “scriptive thing” --both classic theories (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Curtius, Gérard Genette, Roger Chartier) and more recent ones (e.g., Mark McGurl, Jessica Pressman, Leah Price, Nicholas Thorburn, Kelly Wisecup, Robin Bernstein, Tia Blassingame). We’ll also consider such topics as print, publics, memory, ephemera, waste, and the often-announced death of the book. And as aids to our collective theorizing, we’ll derive resources from artists’ books (e.g. those created by Stéphane Mallarmé, Angela Lorenz, and Tia Blassingame) and from fiction that calls attention to its own physical platform (e.g. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ling Ma’s Severance, and Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate).
English 297cl. Critical Indigenous Theory
Instructor: Christopher Pexa
Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
This seminar gives a broad overview of key theoretical interventions in the emergent, international, and interdisciplinary field of Critical Indigenous Studies. Our exploration will begin with the emergence of American Indian Studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s and 80s, tracking its development over the next twenty years into increasingly global articulations of Indigenous studies and, more recently, of critical Indigenous studies as “a knowledge/power domain whereby scholars operationalize Indigenous knowledges to develop theories, build academic infrastructure, and inform our cultural and ethical practices” (Moreton-Robinson 2016). Moreton-Robinson’s highlighting of academic theory and production as both stemming from, and being responsive to, the ethical frameworks and political demands of Indigenous communities beyond academia will inform the rest of the seminar’s exploration of key political terms and sites, to include the following: Indigenous epistemologies; Indigenous ethics; sovereignty; ecological/anti-extraction movements; global Indigeneities; Indigenous feminisms; queer/trans/Two-Spirit Indigeneities; sound studies; literary studies; Black and Indigenous intersections.
English 297ps. Performance Studies and Theory
Instructor: Ju Yon Kim
Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
This course will examine critical works in the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. The class will begin with an exploration of the major developments and debates that helped to establish performance studies. We will then consider how recent works, especially those intersecting with ethnic studies and queer studies, have extended, critiqued, and complicated understandings of the field. The goals of this course include familiarizing students with key terms and theories in performances studies; exploring models of interdisciplinary research; and cultivating strategies for analyzing and writing about performance. This course is designed for graduate students and undergraduate students with some background in critical theory and/or performance studies.
English 320. G1 Proseminar
Instructor: Gordon Teskey
Monday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
The first-year proseminar (taken in the spring semester of the first year) introduces students to the theories, methods, and history of English as a discipline, and contemporary debates in English studies. The readings feature classic texts in all fields, drawn from the General Exam list. This first-year proseminar helps students prepare for the General Exam (taken at the beginning of their second year); it gives them a broad knowledge for teaching and writing outside their specialty; and it builds an intellectual and cultural community among first-year students.
Note: This seminar is only for first year graduate students in the English Department.
English 330. G2 Proseminar
Instructor: John Stauffer
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
This second-year proseminar has a two-part focus: it introduces students to the craft of scholarly publishing by helping them revise a research paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of the course. It thus gives students the tools to begin publishing early in their career. It also introduces students to the growing array of alternative careers in the humanities by exposing them to the work of scholars who are leaders in fields such as editing, curating, and digital humanities.
Note: Open to English graduate students only. Prerequisite: For G2+ students