Schedule of Classes

This writing-intensive introduction to literature written in English may include a selection of formal verse, fiction, drama, and at least one play by Shakespeare. The course is designed to develop the student’s imaginative understanding of literature along with the ability to write and speak with greater clarity. It is intended to be of interest to students at any level of preparation.

An examination of several masterpieces of Western literature, including Homer's Iliad and Dante's Divine Comedy. Some sections are writing-intensive.

A consideration of the role of women in literature. Topics include Gothic fiction, nineteenth and twentieth century women writers, and women in fiction. Drawing on authors of both genders, the course considers gender relations, the historic role of women, the special challenges that have faced women writers, and the role of women in fiction.

A course which examines texts in various genres and which may focus on a particular theme chosen by the instructor.

Students examine the memoirs of writers such as Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Tobias Wolff, Joan Didion, Patti Smith, J. Drew Lanham, Garrett Hongo, Jesmyn Ward, Maggie Nelson, Stephanie Danler, and Kiese Laymon. Students analyze the techniques of memoir with an eye towards addressing the difference between memoir and autobiography, engaging the matter of “truth” in memoir, and discerning the influence of literary traditions as well as regional, racial, ethnic, and gendered histories within an author’s articulation of self. Students write several short memoir pieces as well as analytical essays.

Though its content will vary from semester to semester, this class always focuses on a special topic in English, Anglophone, or American literature not fully covered in existing courses. Examples might include courses on a single author, a literary movement or tradition, a genre, or a theme. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic differs.

A study of the Canterbury Tales and other poems by Chaucer. A term paper is usually expected.

A study of women’s literature before 1800, this course examines how feminine voices were presented and heard in their historical contexts. Readings for the class are drawn from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, and ask students to think through the conditions of feminine authorship and identity in the pre-modern period.

A study of several plays written before 1600.

This course examines major authors of the period from 1680 to 1800, including Behn, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gay, Johnson, Gray, Goldsmith, and Burns. Topics may include Restoration cultures and theater, neoclassicism, satire, and sensibility.

A survey of British poetry and non-fiction prose of the Victorian era (1837 to 1901). Texts include poetry by Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, and Hardy, as well as prose by Carlyle, Darwin, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, and Wilde.

Many people know one sentence from early American literature: Puritan leader John Winthrop’s 1630 claim that “we shall be as a City on a Hill.” Often misinterpreted as a promise of inevitable national success, these words were actually a warning that America’s redemptive promises carried the risk of disastrous and conspicuous failure. This course traces the efforts of English-language writers to respond to both the promises and the failures of the tiny colonial settlements that became the United States. Authors studied include Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.

“In the four quarters of the globe,” sneered the English critic Sidney Smith in 1820, “who reads an American book?” This course introduces the U.S. writers who answered Smith’s challenge, such as Hannah Webster Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, Charles W. Chesnutt, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser. They invented a distinctively American novel and in the process produced masterpieces that are still recognized in all four quarters of the globe.

This course introduces students to modern Irish and Northern Irish poetry, fiction, and drama, beginning with Yeats and the last phase of the Celtic Revival and reaching up through the short-lived Celtic Tiger of the Twenty-First Century. These texts are concerned with borders and bequests of all kinds, but class discussions focus primarily on literary responses to high modernism, cultural nationalism and the Irish language, sectarian violence, and the role of the Catholic Church. The survey explores these historical and cultural contexts, observes the different kinds of critical attention these genres demand, and emphasizes the practice of close reading.

The course examines perceptions of truth, history, and humanity by looking at official historical records alongside narrative such as gossip, secrets, and hearsay. This comparative study will open challenging conversations about authoritative history and power by surveying the slave and neo-slave genres alongside the critical texts of scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston and Saidiya Hartman. In doing so, students will develop an ethic of engaging difficult histories and violent transatlantic archives. By surveying the shaping of narrative from the 19th to the 21st century, students will tune their ears to hear the silences of Black stories and the erasures of master narratives.

A study of twentieth-century literature written in English from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, concentrating on colonial and post-colonial themes, as well as issues of gender, politics, and nationalism. Possible authors include Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott.

This course supports students in conceiving and writing an honors thesis. Students explore the research and writing methods required by a thesis, such as creating a project bibliography, reading scholarship critically, identifying a compelling research question, drafting sections, and bringing multiple pieces of writing together into an extended work of scholarship. The writing for this course will culminate in a polished draft of the thesis.