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Catalogue 2021-2022 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Descriptions
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Education: III. Advanced |
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EDUC 322 - The Afro-Indo-Anglo Caribbean: Education, Feminism, Indigeneity and Migration Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 322 and WMST 322 ) The Caribbean is a diverse and complex place. This course specifically focuses on the Afro-Anglo Caribbean with few exceptions such as Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The focus on these mostly Afro and Indo Caribbean spaces is important for procuring knowledge that has existed and continue to emerge from this region but that have been marginal in the U.S. academy. Although we cover the Caribbean broadly, the course focuses on a variety of approaches taken by scholars, activists and the government to understand this complex terrain. We read novels, feminist texts, historical documents, sociological studies and other scholarly and popular work to gain a better understanding of this vast and diverse territory. Popular works include poetry, dancehall music, calypso music, short stories and plays. This class provides you with a dynamic introduction to the Afro-Anglo Caribbean region. Kimberly Williams Brown.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 336 - Childhood Development: Observation and Research Application
1 unit(s)
(Same as PSYC 336 ) What differentiates the behavior of one young child from that of another? What characteristics do young children have in common? This course provides students with direct experience in applying contemporary theory and research to the understanding of an individual child. Topics include attachment, temperament, parent, sibling and peer relationships, language and humor development, perspective taking, and the social-emotional connection to learning. Each student selects an individual child in a classroom setting and collects data about the child from multiple sources (direct observation, teacher interviews, parent-teacher conferences, archival records). During class periods, students discuss the primary topic literature, incorporating and comparing observations across children to understand broader developmental trends and individual differences. Synthesis of this information with critical analysis of primary sources in the early childhood and developmental literature culminates in comprehensive written and oral presentations. Julie Riess.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 231 and permission of the instructor.
For Psychology Majors: completion of a research methods course.
One 3-hour period. and 4 hours of laboratory observation work.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: OTH
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EDUC 340 - Disability Studies in Education: Research, Policy, and Practice
1 unit(s)
In this course, we look at many different educational settings, both in and outside of school, from preschool through post-secondary education, to explore how ableism/anti-ableist practices influence policy and practice. Emanating from disability studies more broadly, disability studies in education (DSE) critiques the oppression of disabled students in educational settings, particularly special education, and advocates for the end of segregated education settings and the inclusion of disabled people in decisions made about them. Scholars who locate their work in DSE use multidisciplinary approaches when conducting and sharing research which allows participants to engage many different types of texts including qualitative and case study research articles, podcasts, comics, zines, music and more. Participants are required to participate/observe one hour a week in an educational setting. Erin McCloskey.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 350 - The Teaching of Reading: Curriculum Development in Childhood Education Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
The purpose of this course is to examine the nature and process of reading within a theoretical framework and then to examine and implement a variety of approaches and strategies used to promote literacy in language arts and social studies. Special emphasis is placed on material selection, instruction, and assessment to promote conceptual understandings for all students. Observation and participation in local schools is required. Erin McCloskey.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 105 , PSYC 231 .
Year long course 350/EDUC 351 .
One 2-hour period; one hour of laboratory.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 351 - The Teaching of Reading: Curriculum Development in Childhood Education Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
The purpose of this course is to examine the nature and process of reading within a theoretical framework and then to examine and implement a variety of approaches and strategies used to promote literacy in language arts and social studies. Special emphasis is placed on material selection, instruction, and assessment to promote conceptual understandings for all students. Observation and participation in local schools is required. Erin McCloskey.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 105 , PSYC 231 , EDUC 350 .
Year long course EDUC 350 /351.
One 2-hour period; one hour of laboratory.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 355 - The School-to-Military Pipeline Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
As an education department, we encourage our “students to think deeply and critically about the ways in which schools socialize as well as educate citizens” (“About Education Department”, https://education.vassar.edu/about/). This course relates to this previous statement by centering the role that schools play in assisting the military recruitment of its students into the U.S. Armed Forces, which is informed by the ways that “schools socialize as well as educate citizens.” As the largest and highest funded U.S. institution, the U.S. Armed Forces plays a direct and indirect role in the lives of all members of the campus community in the treasure of our country that includes not just money but lives lost and affected. Some of which included our student body, faculty, and staff. Thus, all students benefit from taking this course by examining how these two large U.S. institutions, schools and the military, work together to maintain “The School-to-Military Pipeline.” Jaime L. Del Razo.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 360 - Workshop in Curriculum Development Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
This course focuses on the current trends, research and theory in the area of curriculum development and their implications for practice in schools. Procedures and criteria for developing and evaluating curricular content, resources and teaching strategies are examined and units of study developed. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): Open to seniors only or permission of the instructor.
First six-week course.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: OTH
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EDUC 361 - Seminar: Mathematics and Science in the Elementary Curriculum Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
The purpose of this course is to develop the student’s competency to teach mathematics and science to elementary school children. Lectures and hands-on activity sessions are used to explore mathematics and science content, methodology, and resource materials, with an emphasis on conceptual understanding as it relates to the curricular concepts explored. Special emphasis is placed on diagnostic and remedial skills drawn from a broad theoretical base. Students plan, implement, and evaluate original learning activities through field assignments in the local schools. In conjunction with their instruction of instructional methods in science, students also teach lessons for the Exploring Science at Vassar Farm program. Jaime L. Del Razo.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods; weekly laboratory work at the Vassar Farm.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 362 - Student Teaching Practicum: Childhood Education Semester Offered: Fall
2 unit(s)
Supervised internship in an elementary classroom, grades 1-6. Examination and analysis of the interrelationships of teachers, children, and curriculum as reflected in the classroom-learning environment.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 105 , PSYC 231 ; EDUC 235 , EDUC 250 , EDUC 290 , EDUC 350 /EDUC 351 ; EDUC 360 , EDUC 361 may be concurrent.
Permission of the instructor.
Open to seniors only.
Ungraded only.
One or more conference hours per week.
Course Format: OTH
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EDUC 365 - Social Science Research Methods Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course introduces students to traditional research methods used in social science research with a special focus on the field of educational research. The course covers both qualitative and quantitative research methods, and places them both on a research methods continuum. By doing so, students learn how research method(s) can be employed at any part on the continuum, whether they are using qualitative or quantitative methodologies or a mixed-methods approach in their research design. The course combines classroom instruction, individual and group exercises, research instrument development, and a field research project (i.e., a course practicum) through which students acquire the knowledge and skills needed to be critical actors in the design, implementation, analysis, and use of research methods. Questions examined in the course include: What are research methods, and how are they developed, used, and analyzed in research projects? What are the relative strengths and limitations of research methods and research designs? What are standard approaches for assessing the quality of social science research and its implications in various fields? What are prominent research methods for collecting and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data? What are common threats to validity and what measures can researchers take to minimize their impact on a study? What are effective techniques for presenting research findings to a range of audiences? Jaime Del Razo.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 367 - Urban Education Reform Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as URBS 367 ) This advanced seminar examines American urban education reform from historical and contemporary perspectives to understand the recent impetus to push towards privatizing the public educational system. In particular, this course helps you think about the origins, philosophies, and implications of recent public school reform initiatives that are generally driven by neoliberal market-based ideologies, as well as the possibilities for resistance, agency, and change on both the micro- and macro-levels. Particular attention is given to both large-scale initiatives as well as grassroots community based efforts in educational change. Our class also partners with local youth from area high schools. For the last hour of class, these young people come to our class and you work with them on thinking through what changes they would like to see in their own schools and districts. This also involves helping them collect data and research at their sites. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 369 - Social Citizenship in an Urban Age
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 369 and URBS 369 ) During a 1936 campaign speech President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that in “1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy.” Since then “the age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production and mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem … . For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” Therefore, the President concluded, government must do something to “protect the citizen’s right to work and right to live.” This course looks at how Americans during the twentieth century fought to expand the meaning of citizenship to include social rights. We study efforts on behalf of labor laws, unemployment and old age insurance, and aid to poor mothers and their children. How did these programs affect Americans of different social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds? How did gender shape the ways that people experienced these programs? Because many Americans believed that widening educational opportunities was essential for addressing the problems associated with the “new civilization” that Roosevelt described, we ask to what extent Americans came to believe that access to a good education is a right of citizenship. These issues and the struggles surrounding them are not only, as they say, “history.” To help us understand our times, we look at the backlash, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, against campaigns to enlarge the definition of citizenship. Miriam Cohen.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2021/22.
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EDUC 373 - Adolescent Literacy Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course combines literacy research, theory, and practice in the context of adolescent learning. We engage in case study research about the cultural, semiotic, and identity literacies our students produce in contrast to the literacies that are sanctioned and mandated in formal schooling. We define literacy broadly, and consider reading, writing, visual literacy and multimodal literacy– including new technologies. We look at how (im)migration status, race, ethnic heritage, and linguistic identity intersect with youth literacy production. Finally, we explore how literacy training is constructed through methods and curriculum with a special emphasis on diversity. Ah-Young Song.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 380 - Civic Engagement in U.S. Education Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This seminar focuses on the issue of civic engagement in U.S. schools, with a particular focus on how youth demonstrate critical consciousness, develop critical civic empathy, and foster a sense of global citizenship. We discuss both the possibilities and challenges of enacting social change from youth-centered learning spaces, and special emphasis is placed on understanding how learners can draw from multiple languages and modalities to engage with current events and participate in social action. This class explores how students can move beyond understanding the fundamental principles of government to engage in diverse forms of meaning-making and strengthen their civic literacy capacities in curricular and extracurricular settings. This course involves regular collaborations with students. Ah-Young Song.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 .
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 382 - Reframing Literacy for the 21st Century Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course attends to the ways in which a traditional conception of literacy as based solely on reading and writing can be broadened to address the strengths and needs of diverse students and their multiple literacy practices in the twenty-first century. Particular attention is given to critical literacy and multiliteracies, with consideration for the ways in which different literacies (e.g., media literacies, digital literacies, multimodalities) can conflict or intersect with school-sanctioned literacy practices. Students understand literacy concepts in context through regular collaborations with high school students. In addition to assigned course readings, students participate in a book club and compare different literacy theories of their choice from various scholarly traditions. The Department.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 384 - Advanced Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course explores various approaches to research methods in the field of education, with emphasis on qualitative approaches. The course provides an overview of the different types of educational research, the varied philosophical groundings that drive particular methodological approaches, and discussion on data collection and analysis. Erin McCloskey.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 162 or EDUC 235 .
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 386 - Ghetto Schooling Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 386 and SOCI 386 ) In twenty-first century America, the majority of students attend segregated schools. Most white students attend schools where 75% of their peers are white, while 80% of Latino students and 74% of black students attend majority non-white schools. In this course we will examine the events that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the 60-year struggle to make good on the promises of that ruling. The course will be divided into three parts. In part one, we will study the Brown decision as an integral element in the fight against Jim Crow laws and trace the legal history of desegregation efforts. In part two, we will focus on desegregation policies and programs that enabled the slow move toward desegregation between 1954 and the 1980s. At this point in time, integration efforts reached their peak and 44% of black students in the south attended majority-white schools. Part three of the course will focus on the dismantling of desegregation efforts that were facilitated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1990s. Throughout the course we will consider the consequences of the racial isolation and concentrated poverty that characterizes segregated schooling and consider the implications of this for today’s K-12 student population, which is demographically very different than it was in the 1960s, in part due to new migration streams from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. Over the last 40 years, public schools have experienced a 28% decline in white enrollments, with increases in the number of black and Asian students, and a noteworthy 495% increase in Latino enrollments. Eréndira Rueda.
One 2-hour period.
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EDUC 387 - Science, Spirituality, and Peace Education: Addressing Climate Change Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Climate Change is arguably the most pressing issue of our day. Utilizing the three core values of peace education as our starting point (Planetary Stewardship, Humane Relationship, Global Citizenship) this course examines global responses to climate change through the lens of peace education and global religions and spirituality. We explore the science of climate change and how polarizing the topic can be thanks in no small part due to variations in educational practices (among other influences). We also explore how various religious traditions conceive of nature, stewardship and climate change and their “call” to address it. Finally, we engage with case studies of real environmental efforts from around the world in both formal and informal educational settings. Leonisa Ardizzone.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 162 , EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 392 - Multidisciplinary Methods in Adolescent Education Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course is designed to engage prospective middle and high school educators in developing innovative, culturally relevant, and socially responsive curricula in a specific discipline, as well as in exploring ways to branch inter-disciplinarily. In particular, students strive to develop a practice that seeks to interrupt inequities in schooling and engender a transformative experience for all students. The first part of the course explores what it means to employ social justice, multicultural, and critical pedagogies in education through self-reflections, peer exchange, and class texts. The remainder of the course specifically looks at strategies to enact such types of education, focusing on methods, curriculum design, and assessment. Students explore a variety of teaching approaches and develop ways to adapt them to particular subject areas and to the intellectual, social, and emotional needs of adolescent learners. There is a particular emphasis on literacy development and meeting the needs of English Language Learners. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 .
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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EDUC 399 - Senior Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Special permission.
Course Format: OTH
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English: I. Introductory |
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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
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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.
Topic for 2021/22a: Narrative Theory and Practice. What makes for a good story? What’s the difference between telling stories and telling lies? In what ways do narratives inform, distort, illuminate, and police “reality”? In order to come to terms with the “narrative turn” in the humanities and sciences we adapt a dueling approach: the first technical and the second imaginary. 1. We pillage useful studies of narrative from the ancients to the moderns (Aristotle, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, René Girard, Mieke Bal). Here our goal is to acquire a durable set of tools and concepts: plot, description, narrator, free indirect style, mimetic desire, focalization, storyworlds, and more. 2. To test these lenses, we examine fictional texts that both bind and unravel narrative conventions. These might include: Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World, and short stories by Franz Kafka, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Kathy Acker, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Mary Butts, and others. Heesok Chang.
Topic for 2021/22b: Sex and Psyche. This course examines the relationship between literary works redefining gender and sexuality through their depiction of androgynous hero/ines, femmes fatales, and outré sexual practices and the ‘invention of the homosexual’ at the close of the nineteenth century. The course details the legal and social constraints on sexual difference that frustrated writers’ efforts to affirm same-sex passion, which Oscar Wilde called “the love that dare not speak its name.” The coded nature of homoerotic themes in texts encourages close reading of works that reward literary scrutiny as well as polemical interpretation. The course employs psychoanalysis and queer theory to address the male aesthete’s quandary: homophobia and misogyny encourage him to align himself with the privileged Victorian male through his vilification of women (as tasteless and insatiable consumers of objects and men), at the same time, as he is drawn to the feminine. Theorists consulted: Foucault, Lacan, Butler, Barthes, Deleuze, Sedgwick, Felski. Authors read: Flaubert, Balzac, Poe, Sacher-Masoch, Wilde, Swinburne, Pater, James, Bataille. Wherever possible, we try to draw connections between the nineteenth century and our own embattled times. Wendy Graham.
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
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ENGL 173 - Thinking Short: The Art of the Short Story
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.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 177 - Special Topics Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 177 and URBS 177 ) Topic for 2021/22a&b: 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
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ENGL 178 - Improvisational Writing Semester Offered: Fall
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.
One 1-hour period.
Course Format: INT
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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.
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ENGL 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms Semester Offered: Fall
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.
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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, Joshua Harmon, Nina Shengold (a); Nina Shengold, Matthew Schultz, Joshua Harmon (b).
Not offered to first-year students.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 206 - Intermediate Creative Writing Semester Offered: Fall and 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 2021/22a: Short Prose Forms. In this course, we read, examine, and write various—and numerous—examples of short prose forms, including prose poems, short-short or flash fictions, and lyric essays. Our readings begin with some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century originators/practitioners, then move to the contemporary era to explore the diverse range of such work. We run the class in part as a studio, with some time devoted to writing. We also spend time discussing course readings, matters of craft and technique, and, during workshops, students’ own short prose. Joshua Harmon.
Topic for 2021/22b: 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 2021/22b: 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
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ENGL 207 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction Semester Offered: Spring
1 1 unit(s)
Topic for 2021/22b: Writing About Culture. This seminar considers the relationship between individuals and “culture” broadly defined, with special attention paid to the question of “taste.” Guided by an eclectic range of texts-music and film reviews, memoir, travel writing, arts reportage-we pursue the possibility of a cultural criticism attentive to the subjectivity and instability of personal experience. Our semester is guided by a few basic questions: does criticism matter? What shapes our personal tastes? What can we demand from culture? What does it mean to love or hate a song? And how do our arguments about books, bands and TV-the ephemeral stuff of “culture”-connect to broader dreams about politics, faith, our sense of the world? Hua Hsu.
Prerequisite(s): Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 .
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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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. David Means (a&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
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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.
Topic for 2021/22b: Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry. This class develops our skills of reading and writing poetry. Specifically, our class examines the craft of poetry through a variety of approaches, from the creation and critique of poetry, to the listening to and performance of poetry. We also investigate the field of poetics, attempting to understand the aesthetic, political, and historical expressions of poetry, with a central focus on poetic forms. Molly McGlennen.
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
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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.
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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 2021/22.
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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.
Topic for 2021/22b: Literary Theory as Equipment for Living. This class takes its title from Kenneth Burke’s essay “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Following Burke’s lead, we adopt a pragmatic approach to the reading and discussion of a wide range of ongoing theoretical debates. In each instance we ask how does this theory applies to life? – although (spoiler alert), life itself might turn out to be a social text. A primary learning goal of the class is to master a durable set of critical terms, not as esoteric knowledge, but as strategies for, in Burke’s words, the “naming of situations.” The thinkers we tackle cluster around topics like language and identity (Peirce, Saussure, Jakobson), mimesis and critical fabulation (Aristotle, Oscar Wilde, Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman), ideology and false consciousness (Lukács, Barthes, Althusser, Butler), the beautiful and the sublime (Burke, Kant, Scarry, Nietzsche), and trauma and narrative (Freud, Butler, Anne Cheng). Heesok Chang.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 219 - Queer of Color Critique
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?
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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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). Paul Kane.
This course satisfies the pre-1800 or pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 226 - American Literature, 1865-1925 Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of the major developments in American literature and culture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This course provides exposure to the diverse group of authors who wrote during the 1865-1925 period and who belong to no school. True, some were realists, naturalists, and modernists, but these terms and even general themes, such as “individualism,” do not apply to all. The one term that defines the period is “difference” (read variously as contention, invidious comparison, change, diversity, gender dissidence). This course simulates the great rupture between nineteenth-century prose styles and those of the twentieth century, but you discover an earlier radical streak in American fiction where gender, sexuality, race, and class figure. Works studied are drawn from such authors as Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. Zachary Roberts
This course satisfies the REGS or pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors Semester Offered: Fall
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? Eve Dunbar.
This course satisfies the REGS or pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 228 - African American Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 228 and DRAM 228 ) Topic for 2021/22b: From the Page to the Stage: Turning Black Literature to Black Drama. This course explores the dramatic possibilities of 20th century canonical black literature by means of critical reading, critical writing, and critical performance. Students examine key novels in their historical context paying attention to the criticism and theory that have shaped their reception. They then attempt to transform parts of these texts into scenes as informed by past and present theories of performance and theatre-making. Their work culminates in a public performance of the pieces they have conceived. Tyrone Simpson and Shona Tucker.
This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods and one 2-hour laboratory.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 230 - Latina and Latino Literature
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).
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 235 - Old English Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Introduction to Old English language and literature. Mark Amodio.
This course satisfies one of the two pre-1800 requirements for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 236 - Beowulf Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
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.
This course satisfies one of the two pre-1800 requirements for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 240 - Shakespeare Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of some representative comedies, histories, and tragedies.
Topic for 2021/22a: Shakespeare and Gender. This course offers an introduction to Shakespeare studies through the discussion of six Shakespeare plays: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Othello and The Winter’s Tale. By situating these plays in the cultural and historical contexts in which they were written and performed, we are able to appreciate significant differences as well as intriguing continuities between early 17th century and early 21st century interpretations and representations regarding such basic concepts and institutions as gender, family, filial and marital duties, marriage, the “private sphere,” and sexuality. Moreover, by examining these plays in production both on the stage and on the screen, we try to determine their current meanings and cultural significance. To attain this second crucial aim, we view and discuss stage productions as well as several film adaptations of our plays. Zoltán Márkus.
This course satisfies the REGS requirement and one of the two pre-1800 requirements for the English major.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 241 -ENGL 242 .
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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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 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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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 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Readings vary but include worlds by such novelists as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Austen.
Topic for 2021/22a: Miss Behavior: Transgressive Women in 18th-Century British Fiction. (Same as WMST 247 ) The focus of this course is eighteenth-century English fiction that features “girls gone wild,” women who violate the stringent social codes dictating their behavior in this period. We read a range of critical texts—some contemporary to us, and others contemporary to the 18th-century writers on our syllabus—to learn what constituted “misbehavior” for women, and who was making the rules. Conduct books, educational treatises, periodical literature, pamphlets and political writings give us a cultural context, and prepare us to examine how fiction writers were reflecting and reshaping codes of conduct for their own social, political and artistic ends. Because the act of writing itself often constituted misbehavior for eighteenth-century women, texts by women differ considerably from those by men with regard to topics, style and genre. In the first half of the course, we see male authors diversely imagining female cross-dressers, “female husbands” (a contemporary term for women who sought to partner with other women), prostitutes, witches, sadists and pleasure-seekers. In the second half, we see women writers working in two literary modes—the gothic, and the novel of manners—to respond to oppressive societal concerns about femininity and modesty. Students leave this course not only with a strong sense of the cultural history of female comportment in eighteenth-century England, but also having looked closely at how these pervasive social codes interacted with literary form to shape the fiction of the period. Katie Gemmill.
This course satisfies one of the two pre-1800 requirements and the REGS requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism
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.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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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 2021/22.
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ENGL 253 - Topics in American Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as
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).
Topic for 2021/22a: Narratives of Passing. (Same as AFRS 253 ) The phrase “passing for white,” peculiar to American English, first appears in advertisements for the return of runaway slaves. Abolitionist fiction later adopts the phenomenon of racial passing (together with the figure of the “white slave”) as a major literary theme. African American writers such as William Wells Brown and William Craft incorporated stories of passing in their antislavery writing and the theme continued to enjoy great currency in African American literature in the postbellum era as well as during the Harlem Renaissance. In this class, we examine the prevalence of this theme in African American literature of these periods, the possible reasons for the waning interest in this theme following the Harlem Renaissance, and its reemergence in recent years. In order to begin to understand the role of passing in the American imagination, we look to examples of passing and the treatment of miscegenation in literature, film, and the law. We consider the qualities that characterize what Valerie Smith identifies as the “classic passing narrative” and determine how each of the texts we examine conforms to, reinvents, and/or writes against that classic narrative. Some of the themes considered include betrayal, secrecy, lying, masquerade, visibility/invisibility, and memory. We also examine how the literature of passing challenges or redefines notions of family, American mobility and success, and the convention of the “self-made man.” Although much of the syllabus is devoted to African American literary heritage, we also consider Asian American and Native American literature on miscegenation. Native American writing in particular provides a radically different perspective on American racialism and what we might term an American “blood symbolic.” Hiram Perez.
This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as VICT 255 ) Readings vary but include novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.
Topic for 2021/22b: Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Writing in 1831, the philosopher John Stuart Mill declared the nineteenth century “an age of transition.” Humankind, he argues, “have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones.” In this class, we explore how British writers turned to the novel—a literary form synonymous with newness—in their quest to find order in the apparent chaos of this century of transition. From Queen Victoria’s ascent to the throne in 1837 to the anxiety and experimentation of the fin-de-siecle, we witness the transformations of the novel in response to large-scale historical processes like imperialism, industrialization, urbanization, and the reorganization of domestic life. And, just as history shaped the novel, so too did the novel shape history, writing the story of the world we live in today.
Following Mill’s suggestion, the institutions of the novel—its genres; conventions of plot, character, and style; methods of publication; and protocols for reading—is our guide. Over the course of the semester, we map the literary field of nineteenth-century Britain, starting with what is often seen as its signature achievement: the realist novel. In major works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot, we explore both the conventions of realism and its ideological functions—asking whose reality is actually being represented, and why. But we also explore those stranger and more speculative works—the gothic romances of the Brontës and Robert Louis Stevenson, the detective novels of Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, the science fiction of H.G. Wells—that strain against the limitations of the real, constructing alternative worlds for readers to inhabit. The course concludes with a consideration of the nineteenth-century novel’s lingering presence in contemporary culture, especially in serial forms like television, podcasts, and smartphone fiction. Mark Taylor.
This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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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.
Topic for 2021/22a: Phenomenal Flesh. High modernist writers are particularly taken with the relation of perception and consciousness to lived experience. Their work shows close kinship with phenomenological philosophy, which explores the flesh as the medium of material existence. The course brings questions of the flesh as central attributes of particular groups certain groups to bear on these paradigms. We attend to the subtexts of gender, sexuality, desire, race, class, religion, nation, and ability. We read novels such as Conrad’s Lord Jim, Forster’s A Passage to India, Ford’s The Good Soldier, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy; poems by W. B. Yeats, Wilfrid Owen, and T. S. Eliot; and some theory. Jean Kane.
Prerequisite(s): AP credit or one unit of First-Year English.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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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 2021/22b: Dystopian Fiction. This semester we read novels that re-envision their respective Nows as imminent dystopias, beginning with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Other novels might include: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. Heesok Chang.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures
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.
Three 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 265 - Selected Author Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2021/22a: The Novels of Jane Austen. Today, more than 200 years after her death, Jane Austen is everywhere. Not only do her novels continue to be read and reread by avid “Janeites” everywhere, but the steady flow of film and TV adaptations shows no sign of slowing down (2020 having brought us the so-called “Millennial” Emma, as well as PBS’s attempt to finish Austen’s final, unfinished novel, Sanditon). Austen appears on undergraduate syllabi, in neuroscientific studies, and on white-supremacist message boards. In the United Kingdom, since 2017, Austen has been not just current, but currency—her face having replaced Charles Darwin’s on the £10 note, opposite the Queen. But Austen is not only everywhere, she is also—as the literary critic Nicholas Dames recently wrote—everything: sentimental and satirical, serious and frivolous, conservative and revolutionary. She is both an avatar of the past—of “period” style—and a herald of modernity.
In this class, we trace these many Austens back to their roots in the six major novels she published between 1811 and 1818. Restoring Austen to her original context, we explore how her fictions engaged with major historical events and cultural movements of her time. We situate her formal and stylistic innovations in relation to larger narratives of English literary history, including the rise of the novel, the culture of sensibility, and the consolidation of realism. Along the way, critics and theorists of various persuasions—feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, Marxist, and others—help us to reflect on the pleasures and pains of our own reading experiences, and to examine these “truths universally acknowledged” about Austen’s life and work with a critical eye. Mark Taylor.
This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
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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. Authors might include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Teju Cole, James Baldwin, Chang-Rae Lee, Luc Sante, Patti Smith Paula Fox, Colson Whitehead, Joseph Cassara, Coco Fusco… you name it. We devise the syllabus together. Class meets every week, including, depending on funding, three or four daylong trips to the city on Fridays. Heesok Chang.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Open to sophomores, juniors and seniors.
Course Format: INT
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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
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ENGL 273 - Art and Letters
1 unit(s)
We begin by reading letters shared between selected American writers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in this intensive. What kinds of issues arise among writers as they attempt to connect with their peers to work through life and art? Additionally, students embark on correspondence-based relationships with other writers/artists/thinkers in order to test theories of connection, care, and creation that letter writing makes possible. Reading and writing in the epistolary form, then, we work through questions of audience, aesthetics, and archives throughout this semester-long intensive. Eve Dunbar.
Two hours every other week.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: INT
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ENGL 274 - Reading and Writing American Memoir Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 274 ) On the first page of Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon writes, “I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir. I wanted to write a lie.” This course asks students to consider what it means to write an American memoir, particularly from perspectives historically excluded from mainstream publishing and prestigious literary journals. Keeping Laymon’s words in mind, we might ask how marginalized voices engage the presumed transparency of the memoir form to render lies (or mythologies) that arguably consolidate the US as a nation. How does the American memoir write from and to the nation?
This course centers students’ voices. We learn about memoir (and memory) from reading selected memoirs and criticism, but also from our own life writing, which we share in a workshop setting. Our reading selections provide us with a variety of models for transforming memory into story, including the braided essay, lyric forms, flash, the hermit crab essay, and epistolary, among others. Authors may include Kiese Laymon, Deborah Miranda, Melissa Febos, Doris Cheng, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Hilton Als, among others. Hiram Perez.
Two hours every other week.
Course Format: INT
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ENGL 276 - How to Write a Black Memoir Semester Offered: Fall
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 sense of what the writer has accomplished and achieved. I would then invite the writer for a zoom 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 goal is for the student to write an autobiographical narrative of at least 20 pages in length. Tyrone Simpson.
Prerequisite(s): 200-level classes in English/ Africana Studies/American Studies.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: INT
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ENGL 280 - Slow and Close: Toni Morrison Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
Have you ever danced a “slow drag”? The slow drag is a colloquialism for a form of partner dancing that grew out of the ragtime and blues musical traditions: musicians slowed down the music’s tempo, allowing partners to hold each other closely and move in unison to the slow beat of the music. The “drag” is intimate, marking partners as “together,” for the song’s length, perhaps longer. Partners notice things about each other that would be unnoticeable at a faster tempo. This intensive takes the pace and intimacy of a slow drag and turns both onto a text. In “Slow and Close,” we spend six weeks slowly reading a single novel. The idea is that by extending our time with the text, we are able to see and experience things we might not otherwise. In addition to slowing down the reading process, students produce close readings (analysis) of small sections of the text for each weekly meeting. For this semester, we dance the drag with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Eve Dunbar.
First six-week course.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: INT
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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.
First six-week course.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: INT
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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
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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
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English: III. Advanced Prerequisite: Open to Juniors and Seniors with 2 units of 200-level work in English, or by permission of the instructor. |
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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
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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. Joshua Ferris.
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
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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. Tracy O’Neill.
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
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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. Tracy O’Neill.
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
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ENGL 310 - Entering the Labyrinth: Literature, Art & Eco-Contemplation Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENST 310 ) Labyrinths have been a feature of the human landscape since ancient times, used for decoration, contemplation and ceremonies. Like gardens, they are an interface between the environment and human culture. This course studies the heritage, literature, and use of labyrinths, from its mythic origins to the present, and constructs a traditional labyrinth on the Vassar campus. In doing so, we learn much about labyrinths and the world in which we live. Paul Kane.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS
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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
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ENGL 320 - Studies in Literary Traditions
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.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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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 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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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.
This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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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.
Topic for 2021/22b: Chaucer and his Contemporaries. Texts may include The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and selected Middle English Romances. Mark Amodio.
This course satisfies one of the two English major pre-1800 requirements.
One 2-hour period.
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ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
In-depth study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.
Topic for 2021/22b: Sex and the City in 1600: Gender, Marriage, Family, and Sexuality in Early Modern London. This course explores everyday life in the rapidly expanding early modern metropolis of London at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. We pay special attention to religious, social, legal as well as informal control mechanisms that influenced issues of gender, marriage, and sexuality in various layers of London society. We anchor our investigations in a handful of plays by Beaumont, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Rowley, and Shakespeare, but also explore other literary and non-literary texts. By situating our early modern texts in the cultural and historical contexts in which they were written and performed, we are able to appreciate the historical differences as well as the occasional continuities between early 17th century and early 21st century interpretations and representations regarding such basic cultural and social issues as citizenship, class and gender difference, political agency, race and ethnicity, urbanization, and subject-formation. Zoltán Márkus.
This course satisfies one of the two pre-1800 requirements for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 342 - Studies in Shakespeare Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Advanced study of Shakespeare’s work and its cultural significance in various contexts from his time to today.
Topic for 2021/22a: After Shakespeare: The Poetics and Politics of Adaptation. While Shakespeare has long served as an icon of England and Englishness, he is also the most popular playwright in the non-Anglophone world, and his cultural currency circulates across nations, languages, and media. This course explores the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare for worldwide audiences in the 20th and 21st centuries. Topics may include: the Shakespeare myth and the Shakespeare “brand;” postcolonial and feminist re-visions; Shakespeare, race, and performance; the cultural politics of “tradaptation;” citing Shakespeare in American popular culture; and disability in Shakespeare. We also reflect critically on our own positions as contemporary readers, viewers, and consumers of Shakespeare. Each seminar member completes an original research or creative project. We focus on five or six plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, The Tempest, and Othello. Some prior study of Shakespeare is recommended. Leslie Dunn.
This course satisfies one of the two pre-1800 requirements for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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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.
This course satisfies one of the two pre-1800 requirements for the English major.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 350 - Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature
1 unit(s)
Focuses on a broad literary topic, with special attention to works of the Restoration and eighteenth century.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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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 2021/22b: The Gothic. This class opens the door to the cellar, and descends into the dark, dangerous, and delightful realm of the Gothic. Beginning with the first Gothic novel in English, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), we follow the transformations of the genre and its shifting cultural functions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What makes a work of art recognizable as Gothic, and how and why did this genre become so wildly popular? What cultural anxieties, unconscious fears, or forbidden desires come to light in the monsters and villains of Gothic tales? And how does the persistence of the Gothic complicate familiar narratives of modernization as the triumph of civilization, progress, and reason?
In addition to major works of Gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and others, we consider the long afterlife of the Gothic on screen: from the legendary adaptations of Hollywood’s Golden Age (Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster; Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula) to the teen vampire romances of today. Along the way, a selection of secondary readings from major psychoanalytic, feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theorists helps us to distinguish different varieties of the Gothic (e.g., female Gothic, queer Gothic, alien Gothic, urban Gothic) and to unpack the genre’s complex relationship to dominant ideologies of gender, race, nation, and class. We conclude with the postcolonial Gothic, asking how and why both European/settler and indigenous writers and filmmakers have drawn on the Gothic tradition, and reimagined it, to wrestle with the ghosts of colonialism’s past. Mark Taylor.
This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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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.
Topic for 2021/22b: 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.
This course satisfies the pre-1900 and the REGS requirements for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
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ENGL 355 - Twenty- and Twenty-First Century Poetry Semester Offered: Fall
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.
Topic for 2021/22a: Contemporary Native American Poets. (Same as AMST 355 ) In our course, we learn to read and understand contemporary North American Indigenous poets through Decolonial, American Indian Literary Nationalist, Indigenous Transnationalist, and tribally-specific frameworks. We examine a broad range of poets within Native American Studies approaches in order to detect how poetry can act as a vehicle of social, political, and cultural transformation. We also study the way sovereignty, Indigenous feminisms, and decolonizing possibilities score the activism of our present era. Spanning generations, poets in the course include Layli Longsoldier, Natalie Diaz, Orlando White, Joy Harjo, Wendy Rose, Kimberly Blaeser, Luci Tapahonso, Allison Hedge Coke, Gordon Henry, Simon Ortiz, Adrian Louis, Chrystos, Deborah Miranda, dg okpik and others. Molly McGlennen.
This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 357 - Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
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).
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2021/22.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 370 - Transnational Literature Semester Offered: Fall
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.
Topic for 2021/22a: Lost in Transition. In “Beyond Human Rights,” Giorgio Agamben asks us to cease inscribing naked human life within the sovereignty of the nation-state. Following Hannah Arendt, he argues for “the condition of the countryless refugees” as the “paradigm of a new historical consciousness”: “Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of state-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded the central figure of our political history.” The refugee has been, perhaps, the central marginal figure of our literary history as well. We will read various modern novels that traverse the great topoi of migrant experience: waiting and boredom, bureaucracy, transit, border-crossing, exile, settlement, assimilation, mimicry, and desire. Texts will include: Anna Seghers’s Transit, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana, Julia Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. Heesok Chang.
This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 375 - Seminar in Women’s Studies Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2021/22b: 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, Silke von der Emde.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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ENGL 376 - Vassar Poetry Review Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This Intensive offers students writing poetry, or interested in it critically, the opportunity to prepare creative and critical work for publication in a journal devoted to verse. The course focuses on the principles and processes of publication, including design, editing and printing, as well as the history of “little magazines.” Students are involved in all phases of the project, leading to the publication of an issue of the Vassar Poetry Review at the end of the semester. Open to both majors and non-majors. Paul Kane.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: INT
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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 19th 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 19th-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 2021/22.
Course Format: INT
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