Spring Term 2024

Course Information

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
Course Site

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

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

English 97. Sophomore Tutorial: Literary Methods

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
Course Site

Section 2 Instructor: Sarah Dimick
Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for meetings times & location
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Course Site

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

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

English 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
Course Site

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
Spring 2024: Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

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
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBD
Course Site

What does the novel still have to offer? As newer genres—movies, television, Youtube, TikTok—compete for our attention, why do people still immerse themselves in long works of prose fiction? And why do certain nineteenth-century British novels continue to captivate so many readers to this day? In this course, we will read four nineteenth-century novels by four authors that many consider to be the greatest writers that have ever lived: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. We will pay close attention to technique: how do these novels work? And we will also explore social and political themes: what are these novels about? At every stage, we will consider the unique capacities of narrative fiction: what can the novel do that other genres can’t? Implicitly and explicitly, this course will argue first, that these superlative nineteenth-century novels let us see the world (not only then but also now) in new ways, and second, that the novel is a tool for thinking that beats all others. Alongside these texts, we will watch film, television and theatre adaptations as well as read contemporary criticism to better understand the enduring legacy of these canonical works.

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 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
Course Site

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
Spring 2024: Tuesday, 1:00-3:00 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

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
Course Site

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
Course Site
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
Course Site

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
Course Site

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
Spring 2024: Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

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, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Course Site

“Indians are an invention,” declares an unnamed hunter in Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Ojibwe) 1978 novel, Bearheart. The hunter’s point, as Vizenor has explained in interviews and elsewhere, is not that Indigenous peoples don’t exist, but that the term “Indian” is a colonial fiction or shorthand that captures, essentializes, and thus erases a vast diversity of Indigenous lives and peoples. This course begins from the contention that other categories, and maybe most consequentially that of “nature,” have not only historically borne little resemblance to the lived lives of Indigenous people but have been used as important tools for capture and colonization. We will begin with European writings on the “noble savage” who lives harmoniously in a state of Nature, then move to Indigenous writers and thinkers whose work refuses this invention, along with its corollary category of the supernatural. We will spend most of our time reading 20th- and 21st- century Indigenous literary depictions of other-than-human beings and Indigenous relationships with those beings, highlighting how forms of kinship with them are integral to Indigenous ways of understanding difference, to acting like a good relative, and to Indigenous practices of peoplehood. Readings may include works by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ella Deloria, Louise Erdrich, Stephen Graham Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Leanne Simpson, Kim TallBear, and Gerald Vizenor, among others.

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

English 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
Course Site

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
Course Site

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
Course Site

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

Spring 2024:
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
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

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.

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
Spring 2024: 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 90lv. Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf

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

In this seminar, we’ll be looking at the ways in which a range of writers represent the mind on the page: the mind at thought, in agitation, at rest, at prayer, in distress, in rebellion, and just doing nothing (or apparently nothing). This examination allows us to scrutinize just over a hundred years of novelistic development and experiment – from 1813 to 1927, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf – a period that might rightly be considered the high-point of the novel’s rise. We will discover that as the novelistic treatment of consciousness changes, so the idea of what a mind (or a self) is, also changes: the form (the means of representation) modifies the content (what is represented). What might seem at first like a fairly small thing – a question of novelistic technique – will turn out to have massive and far-reaching consequences for our sense of self.

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 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.

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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.

English CAFR. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing this Present Life

Instructor: Claire Messud
Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

Intended for students with prior fiction-writing and workshop experience, this course will concentrate on structure, execution and revision. Exploring various strands of contemporary and recent literary fiction – writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, Chimamanda Adichie, Douglas Stuart, Ocean Vuong, etc – we will consider how fiction works in our present moment, with emphasis on a craft perspective. Each student will present to the class a published fiction that has influenced them. The course is primarily focused on the discussion of original student work, with the aim of improving both writerly skills and critical analysis. Revision is an important component of this class: students will workshop two stories and a revision of one of these.

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

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit 3-5 pages of prose fiction, along with a substantive letter of introduction. I’d like to know why you’re interested in the course; what experience you’ve had writing, both in previous workshops and independently; what your literary goals and ambitions are. Please tell me about some of your favorite narratives – fiction, non-fiction, film, etc: why they move you, and what you learn from them.

English CBW. Fiction Workshop: Bending Worlds

Instructor: Laura van den Berg
Spring 2024:
Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

Julio Cortázar: “The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves.” This workshop will explore the art of writing literature that unsettles our understanding of reality, that splits open the world as we know it, allowing us to encounter new possibilities. 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 Julio Cortázar, Mariana Enríquez, Sofia Samatar, Yoko Ogawa, and Jorge Luis Borges. 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 and to “world-bending” in particular; 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. A writing sample is not required; you will be writing entirely new work for this course.

English CCFS. Fiction Workshop

Instructor: Teju Cole
Spring 2024:
Tuesday, 6:00-8:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

This reading and writing intensive workshop is for students who want to learn to write literary fiction. The goal of the course would be for each student to produce two polished short stories. Authors on the syllabus will probably include James Joyce, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Diane Williams.

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a cover letter saying what you hope to get out of the workshop. In the cover letter, mention three works of fiction that matter to you and why. In addition, submit a 400–500 word sample of your fiction; the sample can be self-contained or a section of a longer work.

English CCSS. Fiction Workshop: The Art of the Short Story

Instructor: Laura van den Berg
Wednesday, 9:00-11:45 am | 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, Jonathan Escoffery, Lauren Groff, Edward P. Jones, Ling Ma, 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. A writing sample is not required; you will be writing entirely new work for this course.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CFF. From Fact to Fiction: Finding & Shaping a Story: Workshop

Instructor: Claire Messud
Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

In this course, we will explore the evolution of a story from a factual anecdote or incident to a fictional creation. The aims of the semester are to learn to listen to someone else’s story in interviews, and to endeavor to find, from there, the necessary bones for a fictional narrative. What is most urgent? What is most emotionally affecting? What are the details from an interview that stay with you? And from there: what, from a broader account, is the story you are moved to relate? Once you make that choice, how do you do further research, if necessary? How do you select the point of view, the frame, the characters for your fiction? What are the ethics and responsibilities of these choices? We will read work by writers who have transformed fact into fiction, some of whom will visit the class. Past visitors include Geraldine Brooks, Akhil Sharma, Amity Gaige, Meng Jin and Paul Yoon. No previous fiction-writing experience is required for this class.

Supplemental Application Information: Admission by application only. Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class, and, if you've a subject in mind, why it's interesting to you. There is no prerequisite for this course: all who are interested are welcome to apply. For your writing sample, submit 2-5 pages of creative work of any genre. If you haven't written creatively before, you might consider writing a brief character sketch or memoir piece.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CNL. The Novel Lab: Studying Long-Form Narratives in Fiction

Instructor: Paul Yoon
Monday 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students.
Course Site

What defines a novel? And what does it mean to read one as a writer? How does a painter consider a painting or a photographer a photo? This readings class will study novels through the point of view of a practicing writer. We will read one novel a week, with the goal of exploring the ways in which long-form narratives are constructed, from chapter to chapter, from one movement to another—that is, the architecture of it. Please note: this is not a typical workshop. You will not be sharing you work every week, though later on in the semester we may participate in small group workshops and readings. Consider the class an investigation into all the tools a writer has to create fiction, with the end goal of producing 2 - 3 chapters of the beginning of a novel as your final project.

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit ONLY a letter to me. I want to know what your favorite novel 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. Again, note: This is NOT a typical workshop.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CPY. Fiction Writing: Workshop

Instructor: Paul Yoon
Spring 2024:
Monday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students.
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

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 heavily on writing exercises and reading contemporary short fiction. Writers we will study will include: Daniyal Mueenuddin, Haruki Murakami, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Tom Drury. As the semester progresses, the focus of the workshop will shift to creating and discussing your own work at the table, along with submitting a final revision project.

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.

English CVLF. Archival Fictions

Instructor: Valeria Luiselli
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

How do fiction writers interact with official narratives and the archives that support them? This is a course both about fictions created by historical archives, and a course about using fiction to intervene historical archives. If the archive is often historically bound to power, perhaps fiction can act as a destabilizing force, throwing official narratives off balance and offering alternatives to how we can imagine possible futures. In this course we will be examining a series of works –literary, acoustic, photographic, hybrid, and others– that have worked with archives and offer insight into the relationship between document and fiction. Among others, we will be looking at work by Svetlana Alexievich, Michael Ondaatje, Layli Long Soldier, Zoe Leonard, Arlette Farge, Alice Oswald, Humane Borders, and Ecologies of Migrant Care. We will also be working directly with a selection of archives, thinking (and practicing!) ways to intervene and question them.

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a letter telling me about yourself, and your interests as a reader and writer. Tell me about the reasons why you are interested in this course, including what you expect from both the course and from yourself as a writer working with archives.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CVR. Fiction Writing: Workshop

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

This class is open to anyone who can write a letter, not an e-mail, a letter, just a plain simple letter, to someone who lives far away from you and who has no idea really of who you are, except that you are, like them, another human being. I have not quite yet settled on the books we will read, that usually happens when I get a sense of what the assembled personalities suggest. Usually, I suggest films, but I have lately become enamored of Korean soap operas and detective dramas: the food looks delicious, people wear the most interesting clothes and are obsessed with handbags, and small things, such as a piece of crumpled up paper lying in a corner is given serious consideration. A real delight. So, give all of the above serious consideration before you decide to register for this class.

Supplemental Application Information:

A brief autobiographical note, to give me some sense of who you are and what your are interested in now, will be appreciated. Many thanks.

No writing sample. No previous work-shopped writing will be a part of the class.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CWP. Words & Photographs: Workshop

Instructor: Teju Cole
Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

For almost two centuries now, words have accompanied photographs, sometimes to sublime effect. In this writing-intensive workshop, we will model our work on the various ways writers have responded to photographs: through captions, criticism, fiction, and experiments. Students will learn close-looking, research, and editing, and will be expected to complete a “words and photographs” project using their own photographs or photographs made by others.

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a photograph and up to a page of text responding (or perhaps not responding) to the photograph. In addition, submit a cover letter saying what you hope to get out of the workshop. The cover letter should mention three books in any genre that have been helpful to your writerly development.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CGOT. The Other

Instructor: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

In this class, we will consider how literary non-fiction articulates or imagines difference, disdain, conflict, and dislike. We will also discuss the more technical and stylistic elements present in strong non-fiction, like reflection, observation, retrospection, scene-setting, description, complexity, and strong characterization. As we read and write, we will put these theoretical concerns into practice and play by writing two or three profiles about people you do not like, a place you don’t care for, an idea you oppose, or an object whose value eludes you. Your writing might be about someone who haunts you without your permission or whatever else gets under your skin, but ideally, your subject makes you uncomfortable, troubles you, and confounds you. We will interrogate how writers earn their opinion. And while it might be strange to think of literature as often having political aims, it would be ignorant to imagine that it does not. Non-fiction forces us to extend our understanding of point of view not just to be how the story unfolds itself technically–immersive reporting, transparent eyeball, third person limited, or third person omniscient--but also to identify who is telling this story and why.

Some examples of the writing that we will read are Guy Debord, Lucille Clifton, C.L.R. James, Pascale Casanova, W.G. Sebald, Jayne Cortez, AbouMaliq Simone, Greg Tate, Annie Ernaux, Edward Said, Mark Twain, Jacqueline Rose, Toni Morrison, Julia Kristeva, and Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CLPG. Art of Sportswriting

Instructor: Louisa Thomas
Spring 2024:
Tuesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

In newsrooms, the sports section is sometimes referred to as the “toy department” -- frivolous and unserious, unlike the stuff of politics, business, and war. In this course, we will take the toys seriously. After all, for millions of people, sports and other so-called trivial pursuits (video games, chess, children’s games, and so on) are a source of endless fascination. For us, they will be a source of stories about human achievements and frustrations. These stories can involve economic, social, and political issues. They can draw upon history, statistics, psychology, and philosophy. They can be reported or ruminative, formally experimental or straightforward, richly descriptive or tense and spare. They can be fun. Over the course of the semester, students will read and discuss exemplary profiles, essays, articles, and blog posts, while also writing and discussing their own. While much (but not all) of the reading will come from the world of sports, no interest in or knowledge about sports is required; our focus will be on writing for a broad audience.

Supplemental Application Information: To apply, please write a letter describing why you want to take the course and what you hope to get out of it. Include a few examples of websites or magazines you like to read, and tell me briefly about one pursuit -- football, chess, basketball, ballet, Othello, crosswords, soccer, whatever -- that interests you and why.

English CMDR. Creative Nonfiction: Departure and Return: "Home" as Doorway to Difference and Identity

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff
Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for meetings times & location
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

In this workshop-based class, students will be asked to investigate something that directly or indirectly connects everyone: what it means to leave a place, or one's home, or one's land, and to return to it, willingly or unwillingly. This idea is inherently open-ended because physical spaces are, of course, not our only means of departure and/or return-- but also our politics, our genders, our relationships with power, and our very bodies. Revolution, too, surrounds us, on both larger and private scales, as does looking back on what once was, what caused that initial departure. Students will approach "home" as both a literal place and a figurative mindscape. We will read essays by Barbara Ehrenreich, Ocean Vuong, Natasha Sajé, Elena Passarello, Hanif Abdurraqib, Alice Wong, and Eric L. Muller, among others.

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

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CMFG. Past Selves and Future Ghosts

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff
Spring 2024:
Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for meetings times & location
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

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

English CNFR. Creative Nonfiction: Workshop

Instructor: Darcy Frey
Fall 2024:
Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students.
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

Whether it takes the form of literary journalism, essay, memoir, or environmental writing, creative nonfiction is a powerful genre that allows writers to break free from the constraints commonly associated with nonfiction prose and reach for the breadth of thought and feeling usually accomplished only in fiction: the narration of a vivid story, the probing of a complex character, the argument of an idea, or the evocation of a place. Students will work on several short assignments to hone their mastery of the craft, then write a longer piece that will be workshopped in class and revised at the end of the term. We will take instruction and inspiration from published authors such as Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ariel Levy, Alexander Chee, and Virginia Woolf. This is a workshop-style class intended for undergraduate and graduate students at all levels of experience. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.

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

Supplemental Application Information: Please write a substantive letter of introduction describing who you are as writer at the moment and where you hope to take your writing; what experience you may have had with creative/literary nonfiction; what excites you about nonfiction in particular; and what you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Additionally, please submit 3-5 pages of creative/literary nonfiction (essay, memoir, narrative journalism, etc, but NOT academic writing) or, if you have not yet written much nonfiction, an equal number of pages of narrative fiction.

English CCDP. Found Poems, Erasures and Other Adventures in Documentary Poetry

Instructor: Tracy K. Smith
Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

In their quest for clarity, revelation and consolation, poets engage with, reflect upon and speak back to the world in a range of ways. In pursuit of these very same aims, poets also listen closely to what has already been said by others at registers spanning intimate exchange, public discourse and sacred utterance. In this poetry workshop, we’ll engage in an exploration of archival and found materials—letters, news articles, historical texts, police reports, photographs and more—to see what new forms of dialogue they might invite, and what light they might shed upon the questions, concerns and apprehensions of our current time. With readings by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Robin Coste Lewis, Solmaz Sharif, Jay Bernard and others. 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.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CAPR. Poetry: Workshop

Instructor: Jorie Graham
Wednesday, 6:00-8:45pm | Location: This class will be fully remote Spring 2024.
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students.
Course Site

Open by application to both undergraduates and graduates. Class lasts three hours and includes the study of poetic practice in conjunction with the discussion of student work.

For Spring 2024, the class will be remote only.

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.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CPWR. Poetry: Workshop

Instructor: Jorie Graham
Tuesday, 6:00-8:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

Open by application to both undergraduates and graduates. Class includes the discussion of literary texts as well as work written by students.

For Spring 2024, the class will be remote only.

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.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

CHSK. Playwriting Workshop: Writing Plays in the 21st Century

Instructor: Heidi Schreck
Monday, 3:00pm - 5:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

This workshop-based class explores the pleasures of writing for the stage through in-depth readings, class discussions, and writing exercises designed to guide students through the process of creating their own one-act play. We will investigate the fundamental principles of dramatic writing through texts such as Aristotle’s Poetics and Elinor Fuchs’s The Death of Character, and explore how some of the greatest playwrights have embraced or deviated from these principles. Readings will also include the work of contemporary playwrights such as Clare Barron, Aleshea Harris, Amy Herzog, Sam Hunter, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, as well as established playwrights María Irene Fornés, Caryl Churchill, Lisa Kron, Harold Pinter, Adrienne Kennedy, Lorraine Hansberry, and Tennessee Williams. Students will be expected to attend two live theater events during the semester, or watch two filmed productions if in-person attendance isn’t possible.

Supplemental Application Information: No experience in writing in the dramatic form is necessary. Please submit a 5–10 page writing sample (preferably a play, 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.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CLR. Introduction to Screenwriting: Workshop

Instructor: Musa Syeed
Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBA
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 3-5 page writing sample. Screenplays are preferred, but fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and plays are acceptable as well. Also, please write a short note to introduce yourself. Include a couple films/filmmakers that have inspired you, your goals for the class, as well as any themes/subject matter/ideas you might be interested in exploring in your writing for film.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CALR. Advanced Screenwriting: Workshop

Instructor: Musa Syeed
Spring 2024:
Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

The feature-length script is an opportunity to tell a story on a larger scale, and, therefore, requires additional preparation. In this class, we will move from writing a pitch, to a synopsis, to a treatment/outline, to the first 10 pages, to the first act of a feature screenplay. We will analyze produced scripts and discuss various elements of craft, including research, writing layered dialogue, world-building, creating an engaging cast of characters. As an advanced class, we will also look at ways both mainstream and independent films attempt to subvert genre and structure.
Students will end the semester with a first act (20-30 pages) of their feature, an outline, and strategy to complete the full script.

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 Gates, Jr.
Spirng 2024:
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
Spring 2025: TBD

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
Spring 2024:
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
Spring 2025: TBD

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

Spring 2024:
Instructor: Gordon Teskey
Monday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Spring 2025:
Instructor: Tara K. Menon
TBD | Location: TBD

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

Spring 2024:
Instructor: John Stauffer
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45am | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location
Spring 2025:
Instructor: Martin Puchner
TBD | Location: TBD

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

Spring Term 2024

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