Apr 28, 2024

Catalogue 2020-2021

Catalogue 2020-2021 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

English Department

Chair: Wendy Graham;

Professors: Mark C. Amodio, Robert DeMaria, Leslie C. Dunn^b, Wendy Graham, Jean M. Kane, Paul Kane^b, Amitava Kumar^b, Paul Russell, Susan Zlotnick;

Associate Professors: Peter Antelyes, Heesok Chang, Eve Dunbar^a, Hua Hsu, Zoltán Márkus^a, Molly S. McGlennen, Hiram Perez, Tyrone Simpson, II;

Assistant Professors: Kathleen Gemmill, Tracy O’Neill;

Post Doctoral Fellow: Erin Sweany;

Adjunct Associate Professors: M. Mark, David Means^a, Matthew Schultz;

Adjunct Assistant Professors: Thomas Hill, Zachary Roberts;

Adjunct Instructors: Jessica Greenbaum, Nina Shengold.

^a On leave 2020/21, first semester

^b On leave 2020/21, second semester

Programs

Major

• English Major

Correlate Sequences in English

The department offers seven correlates in English. Race and Ethnicity; Theory, Criticism and Transnational Studies; Poetry and Poetics; Literary Forms; British Literary History; American Literary History and Creative Writing. A minimum of six units is required for the correlate sequence. Further information is in the Alphabet Book as well.

Courses

English: I. Introductory

ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of critical reading in various forms of literary expression, and regular practice in different kinds of writing. The Department.

Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.

Although the content of each section varies, this course may not be repeated for credit; see the First-Year Student Handbook for descriptions.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 170 - Approaches to Literary Studies
Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Each section explores a central issue, such as “the idea of a literary period,” “canons and the study of literature,” “nationalism and literary form,” or “gender and genre” (contact the department office for current descriptions). Assignments focus on the development of skills for research and writing in English, including the use of secondary sources and the critical vocabulary of literary study. The Department.

Topic for 2020/21a: Reading Narrative. Everyone today has a story to tell. But are all stories worth telling? What makes for a good story? What’s the difference between telling stories and telling lies? In order to come to terms with the “narrative turn” in the arts and sciences we adapt a dual approach: the first technical and the second imaginary. On the one hand, we pillage useful studies of narrative from the ancients to the moderns. Here our goal is to acquire a durable set of tools and concepts: plot, description, narrator, free indirect style, focalization, storyworlds, etc. On the other hand, to test these lenses, we examine (and perhaps create) fictional texts that both bind and unravel narrative conventions. These might include: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic, and short fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Acker, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, and others. Heesok Chang.

Topic for 2020/21b: Journeys of Transformation. The course investigates the journey as a representation of fundamental change. Not only a plot of movement through space, the journey acts as a figure for transformation in or disruption of physical, emotional, and spiritual states of being, in individuals and groups. We focus on the status and function of the journey as a determinant of bodily character, identity, genre, plot, and history. Each unit also addresses a philosophical framework, an interpretive issue, or an analytical practice important to literature as a discipline. Students develop their skills through class discussion, short, directed assignments, and longer essays, including a research essay and an annotated bibliography. Primary texts include Christine de Pisan’s allegory City of Women, the verse romance Gawain and the Green Knight, Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original pulp Tarzan, Colson Whitehead’s recent novel The Intuitionist, selections from Harriet Jacobs’ memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Jean Kane.

Topic for 2020/21b: Bodies of Literature. From medieval mystery plays to gothic horror to speculative futures literature, both living and dead literary bodies reflect social norms, values, fears, and hopes of the cultures that wrote them. They also establish, reinforce, threaten, and transgress cultural boundaries. In this class we will focus intensely on a small set of primary texts, using a variety of theoretical lenses to explore how they can illuminate different aspects of our primary sources. These theoretical lenses introduce you to the breadth of critical approaches available to literature scholars, but especially ones that allow you to productively discuss the ways literary bodies are used to evoke horror and doubt. For example, we examine how Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Necropolitics all elucidate, individually and in collaboration, the complex body politics of Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild.” For this tale, we use our critical lenses to explore the intersections of gender norms and reproduction and also the horrors and ethical quandaries of procreation in situations of biological, cultural, and political hierarchies. You additionally are introduced to: Poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Monster Studies, the Medical Humanities, and the foundational structural and generic principals of poetry and prose. Other primary texts may include: Middle English Soul and Body Dialogues, Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale,” the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (also Middle English), Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, tales and poems by Edgar Allen Poe, and modern horror and zombie literature (list is subject to change). Some primary texts are read in Middle English rather than in translation. Erin Sweany.

Open to first-year students and sophomores, and to others by permission; does not satisfy the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 173 - Thinking Short: The Art of the Short Story
Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
In his essay, “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin made this claim: “A story is different: it does not use itself up. It preserves its inherent power, which it can then deploy over a long period of time.” This six-week course explores the short story form—a relatively new literary genre—drawing from seminal texts while also exploring the questions: What is the function of storytelling in the digital age? Can we continue to imagine stories in an age of instant expression? What is the evolutionary function of story? What is essential about storytelling—from, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s “Duckworth” to the bingeable Netflix series? Readings might include stories by Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Clarice Lispector, Alice Munro, Gayl Jones, Henry Dumas, Gish Jen, Bryan Washington, Lucia Berlin, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. David Means.

Second six-week course.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 174 - Poetry and Philosophy: The Ancient Quarrel

0.5 unit(s)
No specialized knowledge of poetry or philosophy required.

The class is ungraded.

First six-week course.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 177 - Special Topics
Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 177 and URBS 177 ) Topic for 2020/21a: Imagining the City. This six-week course surveys various approaches to thinking and writing about the city. How do our surroundings change us? What power does an individual have to reshape or reimagine the vast urban landscape? We consider a diverse array of texts (journalism, philosophy, literature, photography and video) and a range of case studies: the “city of the future” circa 1910, 1950 and 2000; underground networks of utilities and subways; the rise of car culture and the case of Los Angeles; debates around gentrification and art; globalization, style, and AirBNB; present-day graffiti artists and urban farmers reclaiming their “right to the city.” Hua Hsu.

Second six-week course.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 180 - Improvisational Writing

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
This course uses techniques of improvisational generation of creative material drawn from schools such as Oulipo, writers such as Raymond Roussel, and teachers such as Ruth Danon. All of them aim to subvert the critical mind in order to allow the unexpected to emerge in directed free writing exercises. The course consists of such writing exercises, as well as direction in using the material that emerges as a platform for further work and drafts. It focuses on the genres of fiction and poetry.

The course is designed to direct writing practice at the stage of generation of material. Focus on generation increases tools for overcoming writing blocks and develop muscles in an area that such creative writing classes don’t allow as much time for as they do criticism and analysis of completed pieces. Jean Kane.

Course Format: INT

English: II. Intermediate

Prerequisite: open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. First-year students with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101 may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to first-year students.

ENGL 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 203 ) This course examines the various forms of journalism that report on the diverse complexity of contemporary American lives. In a plain sense, this course is an investigation into American society. But the main emphasis of the course is on acquiring a sense of the different models of writing, especially in longform writing, that have defined and changed the norms of reportage in our culture. Students are encouraged to practice the basics of journalistic craft and to interrogate the role of journalists as intellectuals (or vice versa). Amitava Kumar.

Two 75-minute periods.
ENGL 205 - Introductory Creative Writing
Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry. Reading and writing assignments may include prose fiction, journals, poetry, drama, and essays. M Mark, Nina Shengold (a); Molly McGlennen, Tracy O’Neill, Nina Shengold (b).

Not offered to first-year students.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 206 - Intermediate Creative Writing
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Continued study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry. Reading and writing assignments may include prose fiction, journals, poetry, drama, and essays.

Topic for 2020/21b: Life Writing and the Feminist Subject. In this course we explore forms of memoir and the writing of feminist lives: texts written by and about the feminist subject. We explore memoir, autobiographical fiction, and possibly even some literary biography. Students have the opportunity to think about the work of memoir in a number of different mediums, including the graphic novel, unpublished letters and diaries, and in-progress digital forms, and also have the opportunity to creatively produce memoirs of their own. Readings may include work by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, Sonia Sotomayor, and Roxanne Gay. Kristin Carter.

Topic for 2020/21b: Crossovers. Students read and write stories that rub up against traditional boundaries, leap over them, move them, and sometimes dissolve them. Taking to heart the lessons of permaculture, where the greatest energy lies at the borders, we investigate familiar dichotomies (fiction/fact, prose/poetry, text/image, high/low, comedic/dramatic, female/male, gay/straight, erotic/intellectual, original/adaptation) and search for textual pleasures in a more fluid world. This section of Intermediate Creative Writing is both a seminar and a workshop: students read the work of experienced practitioners, analyze what they’ve read, and apply what they’ve learned to their own work. Likely writers: Maggie Nelson, Carmen Maria Machado, Anne Carson, Justin Torres, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Audre Lorde, Zadie Smith, Claudia Rankine, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, James Baldwin, Jenny Zhang, Purvi Shah, Layli Long Soldier, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ocean Vuong, Ali Wong. M. Mark.

Topic for 2020/21b: Dialogue Forms: Building the Scene. This class examines character, action, and dialogue through the building block of the scene. We do close readings of selected scenes from contemporary fiction, plays, and screenplays by such writers as Annie Proulx, Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, Colum McCann, Sam Shepard, Annie Baker, Diana Son, Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes, John Patrick Shanley, Callie Khouri, Barry Jenkins, Greta Gerwig, and Waldo Salt. You write scenes in each of these literary and performance forms, moving from short exercises to more sustained pieces and a longer final project that you expand and revise in intensive workshop sessions, honing your editorial and revision skills. Acting experience is not required, but students should be willing to read their own and others’ work aloud in a supportive workshop environment. The class culminates with an informal outdoor reading of students’ short fiction, one-act plays, and short screenplays. Nina Shengold.

Prerequisite(s): Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 .

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 207 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction
Semester Offered: Spring
1 1 unit(s)
Topic for 2020/21b: Writing about the City. This course focuses on nonfiction writing about cities. We begin with a week of readings of reports about the pandemic (Rivka Galchen’s report from a hospital in New York City, Arun Venugopal’s radio-report on a morgue, Wang Fang’s Wuhan diary, Slavenka Drakulic surviving COVID-19 in Stockholm) before reading books that are considered classics: George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London; A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous; Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. More recent books: Patti Smith’s Just Kids; Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers; Harlem is Nowhere by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Also, a novel which often seems to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction: Teju Cole’s Open City. Students are expected to write brief book-reports (less than a page) for each class and two short pieces of nonfiction about cities. Amitava Kumar.

Prerequisite(s): Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 .

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 209 - Advanced Creative Writing: Narrative
Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of narrative, with particular emphasis on the short story. Tracy O’Neill (a); David Means (b).

Special permission. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 211 - Advanced Creative Writing: Verse
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of poetry. In addition to written poetry, other forms of poetic expressions may be explored, such as performance and spoken word. Jessica Greenbaum.

Special permission. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 213 - The English Language

1 unit(s)
Study of the history of English from the fifth century to the present, with special attention to the role of literature in effecting as well as reflecting linguistic change. Treatment of peculiarly literary matters, such as poetic diction, and attention to broader linguistic matters, such as phonology, comparative philology, semantics, and the relationship between language and experience.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 214 ) An exploration of the intersections among language, form, genre, and medium, this course aims to deepen our appreciation for and understanding of multimodal authorship. To do so, we focus our critical gaze upon one of the more experimental periods of textual production: literary modernism. Together, we consider selections of poetry, short fiction, the novel, woodcut narratives, autobiography, letters, manifestos, essays, and film produced by a diverse range of authors that may include H.D. and Djuna Barnes, Mu Shiying and Mikhail Bulgakov, Max Jacob and Zora Neale Hurston––as well as more canonical figures like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Our discussions center on the ways in which writing emerges from its immediate historical contexts, and also how genre and medium look beyond their present moment, revising models inherited from the past and anticipating future forms of expression. As such, we have the opportunity to produce both critical and creative writings throughout the term. Ultimately, this course helps us to better analyze and construct arguments about distinct types of texts through the sustained practice of close critical reading and recursive writing, and to sharpen our ability to facilitate dialogue about complex ideas and various modes of communication. Matthew Schultz.
ENGL 215 - Pre-modern Drama: Text and Performance before 1800

1 unit(s)
Study of selected dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 216 - Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 1800

1 unit(s)
Study of modern dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.
ENGL 217 - Literary Theory and Interpretation

Semester Offered: Spring.
1 unit(s)
A study of various critical theories and practices ranging from antiquity to the present day.

Wendy Graham.

Topic for 2020/21b: Literary Theory Survey. Intended as an introduction to literary theory and related critical practices, this course does not provide an overview of psychoanalysis or deconstruction or feminism per se. Instead, the course cuts across methodological boundaries, using feminist, Marxist, and post-structuralist et al., approaches to articulate and understand common problems: What is the object studied in psychoanalysis or Marxism or gay studies? Is linguistics a science or an art? Is gender an ideologically neutral category? What is the relationship between ideology and hegemony? What is the relationship between dialectical reasoning and counter-hegemony? The course organization facilitates an understanding of the interdisciplinary character of theory typically confined to one rubric. For example, Jacques Lacan reads the work of Sigmund Freud through the lens of Levi-Strauss’s studies of kinship and Saussure’s linguistics. Louis Althusser animates a dialogue between Freud and Lacan. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari turn Freud inside out but rely on many of his paradigms. Foucault reconceptualizes history as the study of epistemological breaks and the institutions that promulgate these breaks and prosper in their wake: the prison, the mental institution, the clinic, the museum (taking in several disciplines at once). Gayle Rubin’s thesis on the traffic in women is indebted to the work of Levi-Strauss and recycled for gay studies by Eve Sedgwick. Fortunately, the anthology we are using groups our readings in a more conventional manner, making it possible for students to identify a particular theorist with a specific strategy and to read more widely in and around a preferred topic. Wendy Graham.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 218 - Literature, Gender, and Sexuality

1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 218 )

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 219 - Queer of Color Critique
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 219 and AMST 219 ) “Queer of Color Critique” is a form of cultural criticism modeled on lessons learned from woman of color feminism, poststructuralism, and materialist and other forms of analysis. As Roderick Ferguson defines it, “Queer of color analysis…interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” This course considers what interventions the construction “queer of color” makes possible for queertheory, LGBT scholarship and activism, and different models of ethnic studies.We assess the value and limitations of queer theory’s “subjectless critique” (in other words, its rejection of identity as a “fixed referent”) in doing cultural and political work. What kind of complications (or contradictions) does the notion “queer of color” present for subjectless critique? How might queer of color critique inform political organizing? Particular attention will be devoted to how “queer” travels. Toward this end, students determine what conflicts are presently shaping debates around sexuality in their own communities and consider how these debates may be linked to different regional, national or transnational politics. Throughout the semester, we evaluate what “queer” means and what kind of work it enables. Is it an identity or an anti-identity? A verb, a noun, or an adjective? A heuristic device, a counterpublic, a form of political mobilization or perhaps even a kind of literacy? Hiram Perez.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 222 - Early British Literature
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course offers an introduction to British literary history, beginning with Old and Middle English literature and continuing through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the establishment of Great Britain, the British Civil War, the Puritan Interregnum, and the Restoration. Topics may include discourses of difference (race, religion, gender, social class); tribal, ethnic, and national identities; exploration and colonization; textual transmission and the rise of print culture; authorship and authority; and the formation and evolution of the British literary canon. Authors, genres, critical and theoretical approaches, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year. Mark Amodio.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 225 - American Literature, Origins to 1865
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of the main developments in American literature from its origins through the Civil War: including Native American traditions, exploration accounts, Puritan writings, captivity and slave narratives, as well as major authors from the eighteenth century (such as Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Rowson, and Brown) up to the mid-nineteenth century (Irving, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Fuller, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson). Peter Antelyes.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 226 - American Literature, 1865-1925

1 unit(s)
Study of the major developments in American literature and culture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Literary movements such as realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism are examined, as well as literatures of ethnicity, race, and gender. Works studied are drawn from such authors as Twain, Howells, James, Jewett, Chestnutt, Chopin, Crane, London, Harte, DuBois, Gilman, Adams, Wharton, Dreiser, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Yezierska, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O’Neill, Frost, H. D., and Toomer.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors

1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 227 ) This course places the Harlem Renaissance in literary historical perspective as it seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways was “The New Negro” new? How did African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance rework earlier literary forms from the sorrow songs to the sermon and the slave narrative? How do the debates that raged during this period over the contours of a black aesthetic trace their origins to the concerns that attended the entry of African Americans into the literary public sphere in the eighteenth century?

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 228 - African American Literature
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 228 ) Topic for 2020/21b: Black Modernism: On Ghosts, Mystics, And Prophets. Can writing be black? Is that a good or bad thing? What makes it so? Can it be both black and modern? Is blackness something artists need to leave behind en route to their arrival as modernists? Or instead, does blackness necessitate that artists be modern in a way different from other (non-black) artists? Beginning with the modernist innovations of African American writers after the Harlem Renaissance, this course ranges from the social protest fiction of the 1940s through the Black Arts Movement to the postmodernist experiments of contemporary African American writers. In giving our attention to the aforementioned questions, we cover the debates that have informed African American literary production, particularly the tension that has historically existed between the aesthetic and the political imperatives that inform the art. Be aware that being distinguished as “modern” is not the only temporal marker that these writers and their fictions share. Our readings this term also invoke the idea of the past (signaled by the presence of ghosts and mystics) as well as that of the future (signaled by the presence of mystics and prophets). We explore through these writers why time travel—both backward and forward—is a prominent narrative feature in black fiction. Tyrone Simpson.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 229 - Asian-American Literature, 1946-present
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course considers such topics as memory, identity, liminality, community, and cultural and familial inheritance within Asian-American literary traditions. May consider Asian-American literature in relation to other ethnic literatures. Hua Hsu.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 230 - Latina and Latino Literature
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 230 ) Students and instructor collaborate to identify and dialogue with the growing but still disputed archive of “Latinx Literature.” The category “Latinx” presents us then with our first challenge: exactly what demographic does “Latinx” isolate (or create)? How does it differ from the categories “Hispanic,” “Chicanx,” “Raza,” “Mestizx,” or “Boricua,” to name only a few alternatives, and how should these differences inform our critical reading practices? When and where does Latinx literature originate? Together, we work to identify what formal and thematic continuities might characterize a Latinx literary heritage. Some of those commonalities include border crossing or displacement, the tension between political and cultural citizenship, code-switching, indigeneity, contested and/or shifting racial formations, queer sexualities, gender politics, discourses of hybridity, generational conflict, and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, nationalism, or assimilation). Hiram Perez.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 231 - Native American Literature

1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 231 ) This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of writing and spoken stories, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the varied theoretical debates and frameworks that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework positions the literature as the creative work of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities and complicated by the on-going legacy of colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Richard Van Camp, among other Native theorists, spoken word artists, filmmakers, and artists.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 235 - Old English
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 235 ) Introduction to Old English language and literature. Mark Amodio.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 236 - Beowulf
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 236 ) In-depth study of the early English epic in the original language. Mark Amodio.

Prerequisite(s): ENGL 235 or demonstrated knowledge of Old English, or permission of the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 237 - Medieval Literature
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course serves as an introduction to medieval literature, with a focus on Middle English literatures (c. 1066-1550). Students will become familiar with the linguistic and stylistic features of Middle English, and will read a variety of texts from the period. Special topics for the course vary from year to year; examples of topics include: Arthurian literature, Chaucer, the Chaucerian tradition, women’s writing in the Middle Ages, transnational/comparative medieval literatures (including French and Italian), medieval “autobiography,” the alliterative tradition, Piers Plowman and the Piers tradition, dream visions, fifteenth century literature and the bridge to the “early modern,” literature and heresy, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval mystical writing. Students engage throughout with the process of establishing English as a “literary” language; authorial identity; the grounding of English literary tradition; and the role of translation and adaptation in medieval writing. The course also prepares students who might wish to pursue work in medieval literature at the 300 level, and/or pursue a senior thesis in the period.

Topic for 2020/21a: Chaucer and Medieval English Class and Society. Film representations of the Middle Ages from the 1980s and ‘90s often use the trope of rags-to-riches to tell the stories of their protagonists: a poor boy becomes a knight (The Knight’s Tale) or a peasant is enfianced to a prince (The Princess Bride). But how often does medieval literature itself tell such tales? How did medieval England envision its class structure and class mobility? In this introduction to Middle English literature, we investigate all of these questions with the assistance of Geoffrey Chaucer—the 14^th century poet who is now famous for his class satire The Canterbury Tales (and who lived a somewhat upwardly mobile life). Through a variety of Chaucer’s texts, we investigate class structure, mobility, and even social uprisings. We will also examine how different medieval genres such as romances like Athelston and The Tale of Ralph the Collier and “loathly lady tales” like The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle address the issue of social class. All of our texts are carefully situated within the historical contexts from which they emerged, contexts that are largely monarchical but also include the rise of a significant middle class in England and popular revolts that were, ironically, lent strength by the havoc that the Black Death played on working class populations (if there are clear parallels between the Black Death and COVID-19, it is in class rumblings that both diseases brought to the surface, rather than in virulence or death rates). Erin Sweany.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 240 - Shakespeare
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of some representative comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Topic for 2020/21a: Shakespeare Through Performance. This course emphasizes the performance of Shakespeare’s plays as an act of collaborative meaning-making, both in Shakespeare’s time and in our own. We discover how the conditions of performance in early modern theaters shaped the construction of Shakespeare’s plays, and how those plays made their way from stage to page. We explore how contemporary productions remake the plays’ meanings for new audiences, focusing on representations of gender, race, religion, sexuality and disability. And we perform Shakespeare ourselves, learning through experience how the language works on our bodies and minds, and how the play texts work as scripts for performance. At the end of the course we look at some contemporary efforts to make Shakespeare accessible to diverse performers and audiences. Each student completes a research project on the production history of one play, focused on a particular issue or problem in interpretation. Leslie Dunn.

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 241 -ENGL 242 .

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 241 - Shakespeare

1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 241 ) Study of a substantial number of the plays, roughly in chronological order, to permit a detailed consideration of the range and variety of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .

Yearlong course 241-ENGL 242 .

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 242 - Shakespeare

1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 242 ) Study of a substantial number of the plays, roughly in chronological order, to permit a detailed consideration of the range and variety of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .

Yearlong course ENGL 241 -242.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 245 - The Enlightenment
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of poetry, intellectual prose, and drama of importance in Great Britain in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century. Famous Enlightenment philosophers include John Locke, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Focus, however, will be on the great literary writers of the period: including John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Johnson, Mary Leapor, William Cowper, James Boswell, and Olaudah Equiano. Robert DeMaria.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels

1 unit(s)
Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of texts from the Romantic era, a period charged with revolutionary spirit and a desire for new forms of thought and literature. Topics may include the French revolution and the emerging discourse of individual human rights; the gothic, the supernatural and the sublime; poetry and its relationship to altered states of consciousness; literary renderings of nature and landscape; introspection, imagination and the self; and political movements such as abolitionism, workers’ rights and feminism. Authors may include such poets as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and John Keats; prose writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey; and novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Mary Shelley.

Topic of 2020/21b: The Age of Romanticism: Revolution and Rebellion. This course surveys the literature of the Romantic period through the lens of revolution and rebellion, both of which characterize this period in British history on a number of levels. Across the English Channel, French civilians were overthrowing their monarchy; revolutions in science and technology were catapulting Europe into the industrial era; English poets were rebelling against what they perceived to be the antiquated poetic forms of the eighteenth century; and prose writers were producing some of the original human rights manifestos, calling for women’s empowerment and the abolition of the British slave trade. Paying close attention to these historical and political contexts, we will examine how writers of the period mobilized the concept of revolution in their literary works and used it as an impetus for experimentation, on both thematic and formal levels. Surveyed poets include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Barbauld, Robinson, Byron, Shelley and Keats; fiction writers include Austen, Shelley and Polidori; and prose writers include Burke, De Quincey, Prince and Wollstonecraft. Katie Gemmill.

Themes, topics, genres: The Gothic and the supernatural, Origins of the vampire myth, Literature of addiction, Poetry and dreams, Theories of poetic innovation, Abolitionism, Political and feminist poetry, The Romantic sublime.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 249 - Victorian Literature
Semester Offered: Spring
1 1 unit(s)
(Same as VICT 249 ) Study of Victorian culture through the prose writers of the period. This course explores the strategies of nineteenth-century writers who struggled to find meaning and order in a changing world. It focuses on such issues as industrialization, the woman question, imperialism, aestheticism, and decadence, paying particular attention to the relationship between literary and social discourses. Authors may include nonfiction prose writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as well as fiction writers such as Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Susan Zlotnick.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 251 - Topics in Black Literatures

1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 251 ) This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.
ENGL 253 - Topics in American Literature

1 unit(s)
The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels

1 unit(s)
(Same as VICT 255 ) The nineteenth century was a preeminent age for novel writing in Great Britain, and in one semester we cannot acquaint ourselves with all the great books, or all the major novelists, of the period. Instead, the aim of this course is to learn how to read a nineteenth-century British novel by familiarizing ourselves with the conventional plots of the period (i.e., the marriage plot, the inheritance plot), its common literary idioms (such as realism, melodrama, and the Gothic) as well as some characteristic forms (the bildungsroman, the fictional autobiography) and central preoccupations (domesticity, industrialism, urbanization, imperialism, social mobility, and class relations). We also focus on careful reading and writing through short close reading assignments as well as through a few longer critical essays. Finally, this course introduces students to secondary literature, in anticipation of the work carried out in 300-level English courses. Readings vary but includes novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Literature
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
British and Irish Literature from the first half of the 20th century. The mix and focus of genres, topics and authors varies depending on the instructor. However, the period in question covers such writers as Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Vera Brittain, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, and Graham Greene. Paul Russell.

Prerequisite(s): AP credit or one unit of First-Year English.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 257 - The Novel in English after 1945

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
The novel in English as it has developed in Africa, America, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, India, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Topic for 2020/21b: Special Topic: Out of Place: Novels of Dislocation. “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” – Theodor Adorno

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone in this classroom can attest to an experience of modernity once spared the privileged: banishment from old familiar places, the spaces once securely inhabited and freely traversed. Many of the most trenchant – and beautiful – novels written in English since 1945 not only make dislocation the urgent theme of their narratives, but also the crucible of their experiment. In displacement and confinement, exile and migration, language and perception are broken and remade. Texts might include: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Joy Kagawa’s Obasan, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana. We supplement these novels with postcolonial and critical theory: Adorno, Brathwaite, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Bhabha, Said. Heesok Chang.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of contemporary literature written in English from Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. Readings in various genres by such writers as Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Janet Frame, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Patrick White. Some consideration of post-colonial literary theory.

Topic for 2020/21a: Postcolonial Literature: Speaking in Tongues. We focus in this course on the contemporary moment in postcolonial writing. Unlike many courses in postcolonial literature that only offer theoretical texts, here the emphasis is primarily, if not wholly, on literary voices. Nonfiction, poetry, drama, and, mainly, fiction. Toward the end of the course, after having been shaped by our experience of reading this literature, we collectively choose a few critical readings to debate our views, whether it be the militant theorizing of Frantz Fanon, the trial statement of Ken Saro-Wiwa, or Arundhati Roy speaking about capitalism as the new empire. The writers we read include Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ayad Akhtar, Hanif Kureishi, Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Binyavanga Wainaina, Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, Suketu Mehta, and Rajiv Joseph. Each student is expected to write a brief book report each week (two paragraphs at most) and, over the course of the semester, two papers about 5 pages in length. Attendance is required and class participation strongly encouraged. Amitava Kumar.

Three 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 265 - Selected Author

1 unit(s)

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 270 - New York Stories
Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
“New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald. For this intensive, we read stories – novels, short fiction, journalism, memoirs – set in New York City. We visit, and in many cases, attempt to conjure, the vanished places where the stories were set. Only by haunting these physical sites and recreating them through the virtual technologies of history and literature will we get to see not only what the authors saw, but what they saw that wasn’t there, and what was there they didn’t see. Your main mentored assignment entails constructing a walking tour for your classmates based on one of the narratives. Texts might include: Teju Cole’s Open City, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, Joseph Cassara’s The House of Impossible Beauties: A Novel, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Patti Smith’s M Train, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Luc Sante’s Low Life, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “My Lost City” … you name it. We devise the syllabus together. Class meets every week, including, depending on funding, three or four daylong trips to the city. Heesok Chang.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

Open to sophomores, juniors and seniors.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 271 - Reviewing Shakespeare

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
This course has a double objective of developing the students’ understanding of a selected Shakespeare play performed in New York City as well as enhancing their analytical and writing skills by learning how to write theater reviews. At the beginning of the semester, we decide on viewing a selected production of a Shakespeare play in New York City (funding for travel and theater tickets is available from Vassar College).

This intensive exercise has the following assignments:

1/ At the beginning of the semester, students read assigned studies on the selected Shakespeare play as well as on issues and methods of analyzing stage performances. In preparation of viewing the play, the students write an analytical paper about an assigned topic of the play and its stage history.

2/ After having viewed the play, each student collects 5-10 reviews about the stage production and writes a “review of reviews” with special attention to the methodology and structure of the discussed review articles.

3/ As the culmination of the preparatory work listed above, the students write their own review of the stage production. Zoltan Markus.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 272 - What Makes a Collection?
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This is a course about poetry—but instead of taking the individual poem as our main object of interest, we instead consider the poetry collection as a form. What makes poems belong together? Through what channels—formal, thematic and otherwise—can poems speak to each another? And what kinds of stories can be told through a series of poems that can’t be told in more traditional narrative forms? Students consider these questions by reading six collections of poetry, and by making their own poetry collection as a final creative project. Katie Gemmill.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 276 - How to Write a Black Memoir
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 276 and AMST 276 ) This intensive is an exercise in critical reading and creative writing. I would like students to read the work of a particular memoirist and develop their own analyses of what the writer has accomplished and achieved. I would then like to invite the writer for video presentation wherein the writer teaches a “skill” or technique that begets good life writing. Students perform that technique in class and revise/refine what they have written and submit the piece in the class to follow. The goals are for the student to write one critical essay analyzing of the memoirs we have read for class and write an autobiographical narrative of at least 25 pages in length. Tyrone Simpson.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor and 200-level classes in English/ Africana Studies/American Studies.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 277 - Global Literatures in English

1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 277 ) This course explores themes, concepts, and genres that span literary periods and/or national boundaries. The focus varies from year to year.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 282 - Vassar Critical Journal Intensive
Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
The Vassar Critical Journal intensive provides students with publishing experience at every stage of the process. Students begin as writers, submitting their own work to the journal. They then act as literary agents, reading all submissions and deciding which essays they enjoy and which will proceed to the editing level. They each offer editorial comments and advice on each accepted submission, sending the essays back to the writers for revision and doing final copy edits for publication. They also are expected to promote the journal throughout the course and be responsible for the layout and look of the issue on the whole. In addition, students perform due diligence by reading the literary texts and criticism featured in the articles under submission. (This task is divided among them.) Collectively, students compose an editors’ note to be placed at the head of the publication. By the end of the course, students have collaboratively created a journal of their own making and design. Class meets once a week, but during the initial and final stages of the process, more time is needed. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The intensive is intended for the editorial board of the VCJ, and is open to a few more students who wish to join. Wendy Graham.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

First six-week course.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 284 - Writing Medicine
Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
This intensive is an introduction to medical humanities, an interdisciplinary field that draws from literature, the arts, and the social sciences to help students gain a greater understanding of the socio-cultural contexts of health, illness, and disability. It also encourages the development of the communication skills, empathy, and self-awareness that are needed to care for the whole person rather than merely treating their symptoms. Each student is placed through OCEL with one of our partners: possibilities include Taconic Resources for Independence, the Anderson Center for Autism, Abilities First and Mid-Hudson Association for Persons with Disabilities, Vassar Brothers Medical Center, Children’s Medical Group, River Valley Speech and Language, Mental Health America of Dutchess County, Lutheran Care Center, and the Alzheimer’s Association. Students gather six times over the course of the semester to share experiences, and to discuss readings and films that provide an opportunity for deeper reflection on the meanings of health, personhood, and healing. Some sessions may feature invited guests, either from the Vassar community or from our partner organizations. Topics are chosen according to the issues raised by the students’ placements as well as their personal interests. Students keep a journal and complete a writing or other creative project at the end of the semester; in some cases these projects might be shared with community organizations. Leslie Dunn.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

Intensive.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 288 - From Pamphlets to Zines: A Self-Publishing Workshop
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 288 ) A consideration of the role self-publishing has played in American print culture and modes of self-expression, with extra emphasis on post-sixties “d.i.y.” movements, countercultures, scenes, punk subculture, and nineties “alternative” culture. Our analysis of different approaches and practices culminates in a series of individual collaborative zines and guerrilla publications of our own. Hua Hsu.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 290 - Community-Engaged Learning
Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): Two units of 200-level work in English, and permission of the associate chair. 1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 298 - Independent Study
Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): Two units of 200-level work in English, and permission of the associate chair. 1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.

Course Format: OTH

English: III. Advanced

Prerequisite: Open to Juniors and Seniors with 2 units of 200-level work in English, or by permission of the instructor.

ENGL 300 - Senior Tutorial
Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Preparation of a long essay (40 pages) or other independently designed critical project. Each essay is directed by an individual member of the department. The Department.

Special permission.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 302 - Adaptations

1 unit(s)
(Same as CLCS 302 and MEDS 302 ) If works of art continue each other, as Virginia Woolf suggested, then cultural history accumulates when generations of artists think and talk together across time. What happens when one of those artists switches to another language, another genre, another mode or medium? In the twenty-first century we may reframe Woolf’s conversation in terms of intertextuality—art invokes and revises other art—but the questions remain more or less unchanged: What motivates and shapes adaptations? What role does technology play? Audience? What constitutes a faithful adaptation? “Faithful” to what or whom? In this course we consider the biological model, looking briefly at Darwin’s ideas about the ways organisms change in order to survive, and then explore analogies across a range of media. We’ll begin with Virgil’s Georgics; move on to Metamorphoses, Ovid’s free adaptations of classical myths; and follow Orpheus and Eurydice through two thousand years of theater (Euripides, Anouilh, Ruhl, Zimmerman); painting and sculpture (Dürer, Rubens, Poussin, Klee, Rodin); film and television (Pasolini, Cocteau, Camus, Luhrmann); dance (Graham, Balanchine, Bausch); music (Monteverdi, Gluck, Stravinsky, Birtwistle, Glass); narratives and graphic narratives (Pynchon, Delany, Gaiman, Hoban); verse (Rilke, H.D., Auden, Ashbery, Milosz, Heaney, Atwood, Mullen, Strand); and computer games (Battle of Olympus, Shin Megami Tensei). During the second half of the semester, we investigate other adaptations and their theoretical implications, looking back from time to time at what we’ve learned from the protean story of Eurydice and Orpheus and their countless progeny. M Mark.

One 3-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.
ENGL 304 - Creative Writing Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. Tracy O’Neill.

Open to juniors and seniors in all departments with permission of the instructor.

Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 305 - Senior Creative Writing Seminar
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. Jean Kane.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

Open to seniors in all departments. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.

Yearlong course 305-ENGL 306 .

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 306 - Senior Creative Writing Seminar
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. Jean Kane.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

Open to seniors in all departments.  Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.

Yearlong course ENGL 305 -306.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 315 - Studies in Performance

1 unit(s)
This course offers advanced study in the relationship between performance and text. Performance in this case is broadly conceived. It can include dramatic performances of plays, as well as storytelling, comic or musical performance, performance art, and poetry. The course may also explore such categories as gender or identity as forms of performance.

Limited enrollment.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 317 - Studies in Literary Theory

1 unit(s)
Advanced study of problems and schools of literary criticism and theory, principally in the twentieth century. May include discussion of new criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, reader-response theory, new historicism, and Marxist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and feminist analysis.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 318 - Literary Studies in Gender and Sexuality

1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 318 ) Advanced study of gender and sexuality in literary texts, theory and criticism. The focus will vary from year to year but will include a substantial theoretical or critical component that may draw from a range of approaches, such as feminist theory, queer theory, transgender studies, feminist psychoanalysis, disability studies and critical race theory.

Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English or by permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 319 - Race and its Metaphors
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 319 ) Re-examinations of canonical literature in order to discover how race is either explicitly addressed by or implicitly enabling to the texts. Does racial difference, whether or not overtly expressed, prove a useful literary tool? The focus of the course varies from year to year.

Topic for 2020/21b: “Blacks and Blues: Blues as Metaphor in African American Literature.” Ralph Ellison wrote of the blues that it is “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” This course takes the blues as a metaphor and follows it through canonical African American writing to consider multiple themes: black sonics, black vernacular traditions, sexuality and freedom, social critique, joy, pain, and futurities of blackness. Students interested in this course need not have a musical background, but interest in the links between sound and black literature is expected. Eve Dunbar.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 320 - Studies in Literary Traditions
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course examines various literary traditions. The materials may cross historical, national and linguistic boundaries, and may investigate how a specific myth, literary form, idea, or figure (e.g., Pygmalion, romance, the epic, the fall of man, Caliban) has been constructed, disputed, reinvented and transformed. Topics vary from year to year.

Topic for 2020/21a: Transatlantic Romanticism: Ecology & the Sublime. (Same as ENST 320 ) This course looks at nineteenth-century British and American romanticism from the dual perspective of the sublime (in mind and nature) and the environment (as it intersects with issues of democracy and pluralism). These two seemingly contradictory impulses are part of a larger movement that could be thought of as radical, in the original sense of ‘forming the root,’ in establishing modern British and American culture. Readings include works by William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, William James, W.E.B. Du Bois and others. A weekend field trip to Concord, MA is included. Paul Kane.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 325 - Studies in Genre

1 unit(s)
An In-depth study of specific forms or types of literature, such as satire, humor, gothic fiction, realism, slave narratives, science fiction, crime, romance, adventure, short story, epic, autobiography, hypertext, and screenplay. Each year, one or more of these genres is investigated in depth. The course may cross national borders and historical periods or adhere to boundaries of time and place.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 326 - Challenging Ethnicity

1 unit(s)
An exploration of literary and artistic engagements with ethnicity. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 328 - Literature of the American Renaissance
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
In-depth study of major works by American writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Authors may include: Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Fuller, Stowe, Delany, Wilson, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. In addition to placing the works in historical and cultural context, focusing on the role of such institutions as slavery and such social movements as transcendentalism, the course also examines the notion of the American Renaissance itself.

Topic for 2020/21b: American Renaissance. The 1840s and 1850s have often been seen as a period of extraordinary literary and intellectual flourishing in the United States; it was also a period marked by extraordinary political, social, and racial tensions which culminated in the Civil War. In this class we explore some of the literature of this period with particular attention to ways in which writers both engaged with and evaded the urgencies of their historical moment by looking at questions of individuality and self-reliance, nationality and citizenship, and freedom and fugitivity. Authors include: Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Douglass, Poe, Hawthorne, Stowe, Northup, Brown, Melville, Wilson and Whitman. Zachary Roberts.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 329 - American Literary Realism

1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 329 ) Exploration of the literary concepts of realism and naturalism focusing on the theory and practice of fiction between 1870 and 1910, the first period in American literary history to be called modern. The course may examine past critical debates as well as the current controversy over realism in fiction. Attention is given to such questions as what constitutes reality in fiction, as well as the relationship of realism to other literary traditions. Authors may include Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 330 - American Modernism

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
In-depth study of modern American literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century, with special attention to the concept of “modernism” and its relation to other cultural movements during this period. Authors may include Dreiser, Wharton, Cather, Frost, Anderson, Millay, Pound, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Neill, H. D., Faulkner, Wright, Eliot, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Crane, Yezierska, Toomer, Hughes, Cullen, Brown, Hurston, McKay, and Dos Passos.

Topic for 2020/21a: American Modernism. American Modernism pivots between high culture (stylistically spare, muscular in attitude) and popular fiction (mawkish, sentimental) to understand the stakes in gendering literary modernism. In academia, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Eliot, Pound, and Hemingway anchor the male modernist masthead; screenwriters and novelists, Fanny Hurst, Olive Higgins Prouty, and Anita Loos, the popular canon. Men penned ‘tearjerkers’, stories that lent themselves to filmic adaptation for a mass audience; yet, only women were disparaged as authors of melodramas and romance fiction. Examining the gendered meanings of nostalgia, consumption, celebrity, this course further challenges the notion of an exclusively male ‘avant-garde’ (a military term designating an advanced guard of culture) through an exploration of lesbian modernism: H.D., Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes. Wendy Graham.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 331 - Postmodern Literature

1 unit(s)
Advanced study of American literature from the second half of the twentieth century to the present date. Authors may include Welty, Ellison, Warren, O’Connor, Olson, Momaday, Mailer, Lowell, Bellow, Percy, Nabokov, Bishop, Rich, Roth, Pynchon, Ashbery, Merrill, Reed, Silko, Walker, Morrison, Gass, and Kingston.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 340 - Studies in Medieval Literature
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Advanced study of selected medieval texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation. Issues addressed may include the social and political dynamics, literary traditions, symbolic discourses, and individual authorial voices shaping literary works in this era. Discussion of these issues may draw on both historical and aesthetic approaches, and both medieval and modern theories of rhetoric, reference, and text-formation. Erin Sweany.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance

1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 341 ) In-depth study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.
ENGL 342 - Studies in Shakespeare

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Advanced study of Shakespeare’s work and its cultural significance in various contexts from his time to today.

Topic for 2020/21b: Shakespeare Today. (Same as DRAM 342 ) This course seeks answers to the question of what Shakespeare means in our contemporary culture. What is “Shakespeare” and, for that matter, what is “culture” today? How dead is the author if he is called Shakespeare? How has Shakespeare been made, rediscovered, and reinvented? The exceeding (and frequently uncritical) appreciation of Genius Shakespeare has been variously described as “Bardolatry,” “Shakespeare cult,” “Shakespeare fetish,” and “Shakespeare myth.” Our aim is to examine the genealogy and the current effects of Shakespeare’s distinguished cultural status. We begin by clarifying a few theoretical issues and exploring how this cultural icon has been constructed from Shakespeare’s time to the present, after which we focus on specific Shakespeare plays contrasting their cultural significance and possible meanings in Shakespeare’s time with their significance and meanings today. Four Shakespeare plays are at the center of our investigations: The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest. In this second part of the course, we pay special attention to stage, film, and digital adaptations as well as other cultural appropriations of these plays. Zoltán Márkus.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 345 - Milton
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of John Milton’s career as a poet and polemicist, with particular attention to Paradise Lost. Robert DeMaria.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 350 - Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Focuses on a broad literary topic, with special attention to works of the Restoration and eighteenth century.

Topic for 2020/21b: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). (Same as MEDS 350 ) The author of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), England’s greatest literary critic, and the founder of modern biography, Samuel Johnson had an immense impact on British literature. The purpose of this course is to read Johnson’s works, to learn about his life, and to consider his influence on some later writers—such as Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Cathleen Schine. Robert DeMaria.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 351 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as VICT 351 ) Study of a major author (e.g., Coleridge, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde) or a group of authors (the Brontes, the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters) or a topical issue (representations of poverty; literary decadence; domestic angels and fallen women; transformations of myth in Romantic and Victorian literature) or a major genre (elegy, epic, autobiography).

Topic for 2020/21b: The Gothic. This course explores the development and the evolution of the Gothic novel in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. We begin with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, three of the most important practitioners of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, before moving to nineteenth-century adaptations and transformations of the Gothic form. Students read a wide variety of texts, including The Castle of Otranto, A Sicilian Romance, The Monk, Northanger Abbey, Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White, and Dracula, as well as some of the key theorists of the Gothic. The course addresses different aspects of Gothic writing (e.g., female Gothic, economic Gothic, alien Gothic, urban Gothic) in order to consider how the Gothic’s mad, monstrous and ghostly representations serve as a critique and counterpoint to dominant ideologies of gender, race, nation and class. Susan Zlotnick.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 352 - Studies in Romanticism

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 352 ) In-depth study of Romantic-era texts with the option of pursuing a select group of writers under the rubric of a specific genre, methodological approach, topic or theme. This course aims to deepen students’ expertise in one or more of the topics covered in English 248. Katie Gemmill.

Topic for 2020/21b: What’s Queer About Romanticism? Why is it that the most influential and ambitious work in queer studies has rarely emerged from the field of Romanticism? As Michael O’Rourke and David Collings rightly note, “We have had [scholarly studies called] Queering the Middle Ages, Queering the Renaissance, Victorian Sexual Dissidence, and Queering the Moderns—but no Queering the Romantics.” Accounting for this critical gap, Richard Sha argues that the Romantic period has been mischaracterized as a “seemingly asexual zone between eighteenth-century edenic ‘liberated’ sexuality…and the repressive sexology of the Victorians.” In reality, this relatively brief cultural moment in England produced a diverse range of queer figures, both historical and literary: from Anne Lister, whose diary records hundreds of pages in code about her sexual relationships with women, to the Ladies of Llangollen, who openly cohabited with the support of English high society, to the myth of the modern vampire, a deeply sexualized and often queer figure. Given the richness of the terrain, then, why are queer studies lagging behind in Romantic circles?

In this advanced seminar, we address this underdeveloped area of scholarly research through our reading of primary and secondary texts, our class discussion, and our critical research projects. Reading theory and criticism from Romanticism studies and adjacent scholarly fields, we ask ourselves—what is queer about this literary-historical moment that has not yet been accounted for? Our goal is to redefine the boundaries of queer Romanticism—beyond a simplistic search for queer characters in the primary texts—to include broader theoretical categories such as queer affect and queer temporality, among others. We focus primarily on the poetry of the period, but also attend to some prose genres, including the diary and the essay. Katie Gemmill.

One 2-hour period.
ENGL 355 - Twenty- and Twenty-First Century Poetry

1 unit(s)
In-depth study of selected Anglophone poets. The course may focus on particular eras, schools, topics, and theories of prosody, with consideration of identity groups or locations.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 357 - Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
In-depth study of literatures of the twentieth century, with primary focus on British and postcolonial (Irish, Indian, Pakistani, South African, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian, etc.) texts. Selections may focus on an author or group of authors, a genre (e.g., modern verse epic, drama, satiric novel, travelogue), or a topic (e.g., the economics of modernism, black Atlantic, Englishes and Englishness, themes of exile and migration).

Topic for 2020/21a: Lost In Translation: Some Other Modern Novels. translate (verb): early 14c., “to remove from one place to another,” also “to turn from one language to another,” from Old French translater and directly from Latin translatus ”carried over,” serving as past participle of transferre ”to bring over, carry over” (see transfer), from trans ”across, beyond” (see trans-) + lātus “borne, carried”

We read some great modern prose fiction that is, as far as I’m aware, rarely taught at Vassar: Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Anna Seghers’s Transit, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, Virgina Woolf’s The Waves, some short stories by Franz Kafka, Mary Butts, Augusto Monterosso, Robert Walser, and others. This selection seeks to ramify our understanding of what modernity meant for diverse human bodies in and around the world. Several of these texts are read in English translation. The theme of translation itself – as literary praxis, ethical task, stance in being, and means of travel – frames and dislocates our inquiry. Heesok Chang.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 365 - Selected Author
Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of the work of a single author. The work may be read in relation to literary predecessors and descendants as well as in relation to the history of the writer’s critical and popular reception. This course alternates from year to year with ENGL 265 . Heesok Chang.

Topic for 2020/21a: Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf seems more like our contemporary than any other British modernist. A scathing and often hilarious critic of patriarchy, her writing is free of the vexing misogyny that dates the work of her male counterparts. She treats women’s quotidian experiences - their travails, but also their pleasures - as subjects of universal artistic concern. Her detailed explorations of the flux of consciousness and the intricate nature of memory continue to resonate in our confessional culture. But so to do her queer attempts to get beyond both the dreary offices of gender and the pondering of one’s own uniqueness. Against the grain of her reputation as a chronicler of the inner life, her writing focuses the mundane object-world in new and unfamiliar ways and probes the elusive nature of our social tie, our being-in-common. Like Freud, she tried in her late work to imagine what a civilized society might look like in an era of unprecedented barbarity, when appeals to collective existence were being marshaled under the banners of jingoism, imperialism, militarism, and fascism. Perhaps her most urgent lesson for us, however, is neither strictly “personal” nor “political”: Woolf made powerful pleas for our right to privacy and anonymity, for the freedom to think about nothing in particular and to do so without interruption in a room of one’s own. On the other hand, no one did more than she to invent her readership and to secure her afterlife as a literary celebrity: no reading of Woolf is quite separable from the life and the legend, the fallacy and the figment, of the author. In addition to reading her novels, we sample her short fiction, essays, memoirs, diaries, and letters. Heesok Chang.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 370 - Transnational Literature

1 unit(s)
This course focuses on literary works and cultural networks that cross the borders of the nation-state. Such border-crossings raise questions concerning vexed phenomena such as globalization, exile, diaspora, and migration-forced and voluntary. Collectively, these phenomena deeply influence the development of transnational cultural identities and practices. Specific topics studied in the course vary from year to year and may include global cities and cosmopolitanisms; the black Atlantic; border theory; the discourses of travel and tourism; global economy and trade; or international terrorism and war.

One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 375 - Seminar in Women’s Studies
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2020/21a: Feminist Disability Studies. (Same as WMST 375 ) Why is disability a feminist issue? This course addresses that question by exploring the diverse meanings of disability, both in theory and in lived experience, focusing on intersections of disability with gender, race, class, and sexuality. Disability is defined broadly to include all the ways in which a person’s body or mind may be perceived as outside what Audre Lorde called “the mythical norm.” We examine the ways in which particular historical, social, and institutional structures have shaped the experiences of disabled people, and how cultural perceptions of disability create social inequality. In the spirit of the disability rights movement’s call for “nothing about us without us,” we also give special attention to the work of disabled writers, artists, performers, and activists.Topics may include gender, sexuality, and eugenics; engendering the disabled body; disability, biotechnology, and reproductive justice; the gendering of “madness;” invisible disabilities; disability and trauma; disability and incarceration; disability, dependency, and the feminist ethics of care; disability rights and disability justice. Students deepen their personal engagement with feminist disability studies through research, self-reflection, and a final critical or creative project. Leslie Dunn.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 377 - True Crime and the American Novel

0.5 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 377 ) “True Crime” (.5) explores the relationship between journalism, literature, film, and other media. In the 19^th century, Literary naturalism, a sub-genre of realism, eschewed literary devices and stylistic preciosity, instead describing characters and events in the direct, unembellished prose of the newspaper account. From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (inspired by the Wilmington NC race riot of 1898) to Frank Norris’s McTeague (inspired by the murder of a charwoman) to Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (inspired by Charles Yerkes financial chicanery) to Richard Wright’s Native Son (inspired by newspaper accounts of a murder) the American novel has relied on ‘real events’ to generate ideas for character and plots. Students may conduct research into the events inspiring these and other novels for the course and present their findings to the group. Alternately, students may choose a crime from any period (be it Lizzy Borden’s alleged murder of her parents, Jack the Ripper’s murders, serial killers, political assassinations, the murder of Emmett Till) and locate and compare multiple representations of the event (whether in novels, plays, movies, comics, newspapers, trials, forensic science). In most instances, representations highlight historical, class, and racial tensions (or obliviousness) over the subject and even who has a right to speak for the victim. (The recent controversy over the Whitney museum’s exhibition of Dana Schutz’s depiction of the open casket funeral of Emmett Till is a good example. Schutz is a white artist and her detractors objected to her appropriation of an iconic black figure and potentially profiting from her work.) Students are not limited to 19^th-century crimes or media for their final projects. Film noir offers a rich cache of images and tropes for understanding the allure of the femme fatale and the lethality of the male gaze in contemporary film and even music videos. Students may undertake original research or complete a creative project for this intensive. Collaborations among students are encouraged. Wendy Graham.

Prerequisite(s): For juniors and seniors and with permission of the instructor.

Second six-week course.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 380 - English Seminar
Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 380 and AMST 380 ) Topic for 2020/21a: Then Whose Negro Are You?: On the Art and Politics of James Baldwin. When interviewers sought out some sense of James Baldwin’s ambition, the artist often responded, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” The forces constellated around Baldwin’s career made this hardly a simple declaration. The issue of becoming a writer was an arduous task in itself, so much so that Baldwin felt he had to leave the United States, particularly his adored Harlem, to do so. Getting in the way of his artistry was the nation’s troubled negotiation with its own soul: the US was trying to figure out what it wanted to be—an apartheid state? A nuclear dreadnought? A den of prudish homophobes? An imperial power? A beloved community? A city on the Hill? This course looks at all things Baldwin, or at least as many things as we can over a four-month period. It certainly indulges his greatest hits-his essays, Notes of A Native Son; his novel, Giovanni’s Room; his play, Blues for Mr. Charlie’s–and several other writings both published and unpublished. It does so with an eye toward understanding Baldwin’s circulation as a celebrated author and a public intellectual both in the mid-twentieth century and the present day. Tyrone Simpson.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 381 - English Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2020/21b: Visions and Revisions of the Fall. In this seminar, we consider the ways in which the Fall is treated as a literary, religious, and philosophical construct by John Milton in Paradise Lost and by Philip Pullman in his His Dark Materials trilogy. While the course focuses on Milton’s poem and Pullman’s novels, we consider other versions of the Fall (including the biblical one) and we also examine the lot/state/situation of the fallen (angels and others) by reading a variety of medieval and modern texts, which may include The Consolation of Philosophy, Pearl, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Butcher Boy, and Postcards. In addition, we screen a number of films, including The Devil’s Advocate, The Rapture, Dogma, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Bedazzled. Mark Amodio.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 382 - English Seminar

1 unit(s)
One 2-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 383 - English Seminar

1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 384 - English Seminar

1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 385 - English Seminar

1 unit(s)
One 3-hour period.

Not offered in 2020/21.

Course Format: CLS
ENGL 387 - The Research Intensive: Sources, Methods, Processes
Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
This six-week intensive prepares students to write a thesis in English, or to undertake the kind of research required in many 300-level English seminars. In our weekly meetings, we focus on defining a research project, identifying appropriate resources, exploring different methodological approaches, and discussing what’s at stake in literary studies. The weekly meetings also provide a space for students to share ideas and to discuss the challenges of doing research in English. By the end of the Intensive, the students have produced a thesis or research project proposal, a 5-7 page literature review, and an annotated bibliography. Susan Zlotnick.

First six-week course.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT
ENGL 399 - Senior Independent Work
Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Open by permission of the Chair. One unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.

Course Format: OTH

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English Department

Programs

Courses

ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing

ENGL 170 - Approaches to Literary Studies

ENGL 173 - Thinking Short: The Art of the Short Story

ENGL 174 - Poetry and Philosophy: The Ancient Quarrel

ENGL 177 - Special Topics

ENGL 180 - Improvisational Writing

ENGL 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms

ENGL 205 - Introductory Creative Writing

ENGL 206 - Intermediate Creative Writing

ENGL 207 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction

ENGL 209 - Advanced Creative Writing: Narrative

ENGL 211 - Advanced Creative Writing: Verse

ENGL 213 - The English Language

ENGL 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy

ENGL 215 - Pre-modern Drama: Text and Performance before 1800

ENGL 216 - Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 1800

ENGL 217 - Literary Theory and Interpretation

ENGL 218 - Literature, Gender, and Sexuality

ENGL 219 - Queer of Color Critique

ENGL 222 - Early British Literature

ENGL 225 - American Literature, Origins to 1865

ENGL 226 - American Literature, 1865-1925

ENGL 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors

ENGL 228 - African American Literature

ENGL 229 - Asian-American Literature, 1946-present

ENGL 230 - Latina and Latino Literature

ENGL 231 - Native American Literature

ENGL 235 - Old English

ENGL 236 - Beowulf

ENGL 237 - Medieval Literature

ENGL 240 - Shakespeare

ENGL 241 - Shakespeare

ENGL 242 - Shakespeare

ENGL 245 - The Enlightenment

ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels

ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism

ENGL 249 - Victorian Literature

ENGL 251 - Topics in Black Literatures

ENGL 253 - Topics in American Literature

ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels

ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Literature

ENGL 257 - The Novel in English after 1945

ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures

ENGL 265 - Selected Author

ENGL 270 - New York Stories

ENGL 271 - Reviewing Shakespeare

ENGL 272 - What Makes a Collection?

ENGL 276 - How to Write a Black Memoir

ENGL 277 - Global Literatures in English

ENGL 282 - Vassar Critical Journal Intensive

ENGL 284 - Writing Medicine

ENGL 288 - From Pamphlets to Zines: A Self-Publishing Workshop

ENGL 290 - Community-Engaged Learning

ENGL 298 - Independent Study

ENGL 300 - Senior Tutorial

ENGL 302 - Adaptations

ENGL 304 - Creative Writing Seminar

ENGL 305 - Senior Creative Writing Seminar

ENGL 306 - Senior Creative Writing Seminar

ENGL 315 - Studies in Performance

ENGL 317 - Studies in Literary Theory

ENGL 318 - Literary Studies in Gender and Sexuality

ENGL 319 - Race and its Metaphors

ENGL 320 - Studies in Literary Traditions

ENGL 325 - Studies in Genre

ENGL 326 - Challenging Ethnicity

ENGL 328 - Literature of the American Renaissance

ENGL 329 - American Literary Realism

ENGL 330 - American Modernism

ENGL 331 - Postmodern Literature

ENGL 340 - Studies in Medieval Literature

ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance

ENGL 342 - Studies in Shakespeare

ENGL 345 - Milton

ENGL 350 - Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature

ENGL 351 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

ENGL 352 - Studies in Romanticism