English Courses

While refining students' general analytical and interpretive skills, this course offers intensive examination of specific issues in literature and culture, often those at the center of current critical interest. Recent sections have focused on The Gangster Film, Memoir and Sexuality, Quest for the Grail, and Native American Literature. Students may only count one ENG 255 that is a cross-listed Modern Language course toward the major or minor.

Spring Semester information

255A: Tps:African American Women Playwrights

Many readers may be familiar with groundbreakers like Lorraine Hansberry, whose Raisin in the Sun has become part of the canon of Civil Rights era reading. But in the 1960s and 1970s, African American women playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange were doing experiments with language and theatricality that had never been seen before. And from the 1980s into the present, we continue to witness important works by writers like Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks (the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama), Lynn Nottage, and many others.
This course focuses primarily on works by these more recent playwrights, with specific attention to ways that race/racism and gender/sexuality-- as well as social class and professional marginalization--have affected their work and become integral to their plays. This is a course that will require active participation; since it is also a "W" class, students will do a variety of writing exercises and more formal papers.

255B: Tps:Poet, Seeker, Lover, Friend

Drawing inspiration from Eudora Welty's aphorism "all serious daring starts from within," this course will analyze poetry, fiction, and drama while asking questions about the directions that even a "sheltered life" can take.  Core poems will include the fourteenth-century poem Pearl, seventeenth-century poems of love and friendship by John Donne and Katherine Philips respectively, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Mary Jo Salter's "Elegies for Etsuko." We will also read Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter's Tale, Jane Austen's Persuasion, Toni Morrison's Sula, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. Four of your five papers will be analytical in focus; your penultimate paper will consist of a creative letter or monologue that incorporates research on secondary sources into your explication of poems by Donne, Philips, or Eliot.

255C: Tps:Viking Myths and Modern Myth-making

This course introduces students to a wide range of texts from the Viking-Age North Sea region (ca. 793¿1300 CE), beginning with the first Norse territorial expansions into Anglo-Saxon England and ending with the widespread Christianization of Iceland and Norway. The course will include selections from Old English poetry, the Eddas (prose and poetic), Norse þattr, Icelandic sagas, Icelandic law, Arabic travel narratives, and various other documents that tell the story of cultural contact between the Viking peoples and their neighbors near and far. We will consider the act of encountering literature in translation, investigate the historical and etymological origins of the term Viking, and probe the assumptions behind pop culture representations of medieval Scandinavians. The course will also address the appropriation of Viking culture by modern special interest groups. What are the past and present myths surrounding Viking culture, and how can we begin to uncover the truth about this complex group of peoples?

Fall Semester information

255A: Topics:Literature and Living Systems

How should the humanities account for the fact that 39 trillion of the 69 trillion cells in the human body consist of bacteria and other microbial life forms, with the remaining minority comprising the "human" part of us? Or that this teeming human microbiome respires within the gaseous halo of a planet regulated by 3 trillion trees? Or that these trees speak to each other and share resources through subterranean fungal mycelia that join them into a networked intelligence? Or that these "wood wide webs" are merely cells within the respiratory system of Gaia, which cycles gasses between stratosphere and oceanic abyss, and sustains these numberless trees, mycelia, and microbes? Or that Gaia itself, perhaps, is merely the flourishing of a tiny seed that once traveled through space on a piece of rock from Mars or elsewhere, petrified in stasis, before falling to the molten Earth and awakening an ooze of archaic prokaryotes? Science shows us pieces of the living systems that we inhabit, but perhaps only the human imagination, as an emergent function of these systems, can join the pieces together into a fuller understanding of life far above and far below the scale of our perception. This course will explore the ways that writers attempt to conceive our location, status, dependency, vulnerability, and ecstasy within these systems. Our reading will include scientific nonfiction sketching the dimensions of the living world, speculative fiction searching the mysteries of ecology, and ecopoetic meditations on the posthuman condition. Using scientifically informed literature, we will ponder our life and consciousness as part of a living network, in which the human subject is simultaneously cell, organism, and planet. Our writing will explore the paradox of figuring nonhuman scale, experience, and consciousness using the human construct of language.

255B: Topics:Contemporary Black Writers

This course will focus on African American writers whose works in the past decade have been instrumental in our understanding of what it means to live in a world fraught with inequalities, but also one that has the potential for growth and joy. We will read across the genres of fiction, drama, poetry, and memoir in our efforts to feel the present-day urgency of Black voices as informed by the historical past. Since this is a "W" course, students will be expected to engage in writing about these works as well as participating actively in class discussion.

255C: Topics:Melodrama Across Media

The term "melodrama" is often used in a derogatory sense, to dismiss categories of people (particularly women, gay men, and people of color) as excessively emotional and artworks as cringingly outdated. And yet, as a genre, melodrama is as modern as sci-fi and horror, and despite its bad reputation, it continues to structure how we make sense of the moral problems and social conflicts around us. In this course, we will study melodrama's emergence on the early 19th century stage, formed in the crucible of secularism and democratic revolutions, and track its evolution as it migrates from the theatre to the cinema, television, and, finally, social media. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to how the genre constantly re-modernizes itself in order to address new social problems and its circulation to every corner of the globe, from France and Britain to India and Latin America.

255D: Topics:Black Global Cinemas