Literatures in English
The Department of Literatures in English offers a wide range of courses in literatures of the Anglophone world, from medieval romance to contemporary novels and film. Students develop their own paths through the major, experimenting with historical periods, genres, forms, and methodologies, while also developing expertise in specific areas.
The department stresses critical thinking, incisive writing and speaking, and a sense of initiative and responsibility for the enterprise of interpretation. With their advisers, Literatures in English majors design a program of study that deepens their understanding of diverse genres, textual traditions, and periods. We encourage students to explore the history of cultural production and reception and also to question the presuppositions of literary study. The major culminates in an independently written essay of 30-40 pages, developed during a senior research seminar in the fall semester and individually mentored by a faculty member in the spring. Students are encouraged to take at least two English courses at Bryn Mawr College or Haverford College before signing up for the major or minor.
Academic Opportunities
Concentration
A Concentration in Creative Writing will be not an option for the class of 2027 and thereafter.
Study Abroad
Students should complete both ENGL 250 and one 300-level course before leaving for a semester or year abroad. Students may petition the department to count up to two study abroad courses towards the major, but students should be advised that two courses are often counted as one, given differences in intensity of coursework abroad. Students must send their requests, and full syllabuses of the courses they took/will take, to the department chair.
Creative Writing Courses
One 200-level Creative Writing course can count towards the major or minor; it will count as a 200-level Literatures in English class even if it is listed at the 300 level.
Film Studies Courses & Minor in Film Studies
There is no limit to the number of courses in film studies that may count toward the Literatures in English major, except for a student majoring in Literatures in English who is also seeking to declare a minor in Film Studies. In that case two (and only two) of the courses that comprise the six-course Film Studies minor may also count towards the eleven-course Literatures in English major. The minimum number of courses required to complete a Literatures in English major and a minor in Film Studies is thus fifteen courses. All film classes at BMC and HC count towards the major, including those offered by the Department of History in Art.
Allied Courses
Students may petition the department to count one course from outside the department as an allied course toward the major. They must make an argument for why the course enhances their major.
Minors Allied with Literatures in English
The Department of Literatures in English contributes certain courses toward minors in Africana Studies, in Asian American Studies, in Comparative Literature, in Child and Family Studies, in Environmental Studies, in Film Studies, in Gender and Sexuality Studies, in Health Studies, in Latin American, Iberian, and Latina/o Studies, and in Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies.
Literatures in English Majors and the Education Certification Program
Literatures in English majors planning to complete an education certification in their senior year should file a work plan with the chairs of the Education and Literatures in English Departments no later than December 1 of their junior year. Literatures in English majors on this path will follow an accelerated writing schedule in their senior year.
Extended Research
Some students seek a longer horizon and a chance to dig deeper into their research interests. Rising juniors and seniors in Literatures in English frequently apply for fellowship support from the Hanna Holborn Gray program, to pursue original research over the summer or through the year. The projects may be stand-alone or may lead to a senior essay. In either case, students work closely with faculty advisers to define the goals, methods, and potential outcomes of their research.
Major Requirements
The major requires a total of eleven courses. Three courses are required: ENGL B250 , ENGL B398 and ENGL B399. Of the other eight courses, at least three must be at the 300-level (exclusive of ENGL B398 and ENGL B399). All 300-level courses must be taken at BMC or HC. ENGL B250 must be taken before the senior year. One 100-level class may be taken as a first year or sophomore, and only one may count towards the major.
- ENGL B250 Methods of Literary Study (recommended to take in sophomore year, but must be taken before the senior year. Prerequisite: at least one 200-level course)
- ENGL B398 Senior Seminar (offered exclusively in the fall, on Mondays, 2:40-4pm)
- ENGL B399 Senior Essay (taken in the spring, with an individual adviser)
Writing Requirement
By the end of their junior year, English majors must satisfy the College's Writing Intensive (WI) Requirement. ENGL B250 is the department’s WI course.
Departmental Honors
Students who have done distinguished work in their courses in the major and who write outstanding senior essays will be considered for departmental honors.
Minor Requirements
Students must declare their minor by the end of their junior year.
- The minor requires a total of six courses
- Five English courses (at least one at the 300 level). 300 levels must be taken at BMC or HC. One 200 level Creative Writing course may count towards the minor.
- ENGL B250 Methods of Literary Study (must be taken before the senior year. Prerequisite: one or preferably two 200-level English courses)
ENGL B103 American Futures: Literatures of New World Fantasy (1 Unit)
This 100-level seminar for freshmen and sophomores offers a taste of the reading and writing practices of the English major. It is not required for the major, but counts. Freshmen and sophomores may take only one 100-level course. In this course we will take a trans-historical look at American fantasies about the Beginning with with Columbus’ letters to the Queen of Spain, we will move through the Salem Witch trials and fears of devilish possession, Indian Captivity narratives and the Western, the Ghost Dance religion, free-love, feminist, black and socialist utopian movements, space-exploration fantasies, and end with close attention to the emergent literary genres of Afro- and Native-futurism. We will practice close reading and the writing and discussion skills necessary to an English major, through engagement with how questions of race and colonialism have driven American future-fantasies from first contact to Star Trek and beyond.
ENGL B105 Hollywood on Hollywood (1 Unit)
How did Hollywood become a global powerhouse of cultural production? How have Hollywood films responded to technological and political change? What, frankly, does Hollywood think about itself? This class will provide an introduction to the history of Hollywood film production through the stories Hollywood has told about itself, from the golden age of the studio system, to the trailblazing directors of New Hollywood, to the contemporary world of franchises and streaming. By watching movies about movies, we will consider Hollywood as a land of both enchanting dreams and deadly nightmares, populated with forgotten film stars, maniacal directors, aspiring outsiders, and insufferable studio executives. In so doing, students will learn how to watch movies critically, considering their thematic content and their historical conditions of production, and gain an understanding of and appreciation for Hollywood’s history and its connection to American and global politics. Likely films include Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, The Player, and Mulholland Dr.
ENGL B106 Romance to Bromance (1 Unit)
This course examines the ongoing popularity of romance, examining the genre from the Middle Ages to contemporary romantic comedies. In doing so, we will pay particular attention to the gender politics romance produces, supports, and challenges, exploring how various historical moments and media conceptualize love, desire, sex, and marriage. Texts will include Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_, Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_, Richard Hurd's eighteenth-century _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, and nineteenth-century bodice rippers. We will also discuss the ongoing publication of Harlequin romances, the popularity of romantic comedy in film (from the 1930s to now) as well as the reimagining of romance tropes and male intimacy in films like "Brokeback Mountain" and buddy comedies.
ENGL B130 Weird Poems (1 Unit)
A poem is a strange thing to write and an even odder thing to read. In this class, we will encounter a series of poems that press language to its limits, or make familiar ideas seem wildly unfamiliar. We will also develop tools for writing about poems, particularly when they seem to be purposefully complicated.
ENGL B135 Shakespeare . . . in love? (1 Unit)
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” wrote William Shakespeare in his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Certainly this was the case for his most famous lovers, Romeo and Juliet, but it also holds true for many of Shakespeare’s other characters, too. Love-- true and otherwise-- is one of the poet’s most tackled themes, in both his poetry and plays alike. This class will introduce first years and sophomores to the work of Shakespeare with a focus on how romantic love functions in his plots. Guided by literary criticism in feminist, queer, and trans studies, we will engage with selected Shakespearean sonnets, comedies, and tragedies. As we read, we will consider such topics as the depiction and treatment of women; the gendered language of desire; the relationship dynamics of Bard’s most infamous power couples; and more. Please note: while we will do some in-class textual comparisons to No Fear Shakespeare and modern film adaptations of the plays, students are expected to read the assigned texts in their original Early Modern English form. Course is only for Freshmen and Sophomore
ENGL B140 Religion, Sex, and Revolution in Milton's Paradise Lost (1 Unit)
Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic poem about the battle between Heaven and Hell, was first published in 1673. It has remained one of the most influential works of English Literature, fostering fascinating debates about spirituality, revolution, gender and sexuality. Milton’s poem is a window into the complicated theological frameworks that shape his understanding of bodies, desires, freedoms, and, of course, the shortcomings of our fallen selves. This course will allow first-years and sophomores to dive deep into one of the greatest poems ever written. Does Milton’s epic poem unwittingly celebrate Satan’s revolt against the tyranny of an absolutist god and turn Satan into a sexy freedom-fighting hero? Does the epic intend to reveal the seductiveness of fantasies of sexual and political freedom, luring readers in to be, as one Miltonist would have it, "Surprised by Sin?" At stake in this class are the competing interests of Milton’s personal and spiritual politics, the complex interactions between spiritual and revolutionary discourses, and the entanglement of secular, sexual love and religious faith. Only open to Freshmen and Sophomore
ENGL B175 Queer American Poetry (1 Unit)
What does poetry have to say about the history of sexuality? How do queer voices, expansively defined, disrupt poetic norms and forms? How has poetry been congenial to the project of imagining and making queer communities, queer spaces, and even queer worlds? In this course, we survey the work of queer American poets from the late nineteenth century to the present, as we touch on major topics in the history of sexuality, queer studies, and American cultural history. This course provides an overview of American poetry as well as an introduction to queer studies concepts and frameworks; no prior experience with these fields is necessary.
ENGL B193 Latinx Monsters (1 Unit)
Latinx culture is filled with folktale figures to scare misbehaving children, from la llorona and la ciguapa to el cucuy and el chupacabras. At the same time, Latina/o/x/e authors and artists often mobilize monsters and images of monstrosity to symbolically interrogate different kinds of oppression, exploitation, and other-ing. This course focuses on monsters and the monstrous to ask, Who and what are the monsters? And what can we learn from the violence associated with monstrosity? We will examine folklore creatures, ghostly hauntings, witches, vampires, werewolves and others with magical abilities to explore how they simultaneously embody histories of intergenerational trauma and imagine alternative ways of knowing and being. We will analyze a range of Latinx literary and cultural production from short stories and novels to graphic narratives, as well as film and visual art. In doing so, we will develop a deeper appreciation for the critical potential of monsters in Latinx culture. Since this is a 100-level course, sustained attention will be placed on developing close-reading and essay writing skills.
ENGL B201 Chaucer: Canterbury Tales (1 Unit)
Access to and skill in reading Middle English will be acquired through close study of the Tales. Exploration of Chaucer’s narrative strategies and of a variety of critical approaches to the work will be the major undertakings of the semester.
ENGL B202 Science Fiction (1 Unit)
What does the future look like? Is it a time of freedom and life-changing technology? Or one of disaster and totalitarian control? How can literature and writing help us imagine, predict, or alter these possibilities? In this course, we’ll read a broad survey of science fiction, related genres, and precursors, from the medieval period to the present day. We will ask about what sort of futures these texts can imagine as well as what sort of changes or alternatives they are unable to imagine. We’ll also consider how they confront, expose, and aestheticize issues of capitalism, race, gender, colonialism, sexuality, and climate change through depictions of worlds that are not quite our own. We’ll read works by authors such as Octavia Butler, Margaret Cavendish, Ursula K. Le Guin, China Miéville, and Mary Shelley, alongside select science fiction films and works of scholarship and criticism on science fiction, utopias, the cyborg, and other topics. Students will learn to think critically and historically about science fiction texts, practice close reading and narrative analysis, and explore their own speculations about the future.
ENGL B204 Native Land, American Literatures, 1607-1899 (1 Unit)
This course will explore Anglophone narratives by white and Indigenous writers, between the arrival of the British in Jamestown and the Philippine-American War. We will examine narratives of conquest that understand colonial and US expansion across Indigenous lands as “manifest destiny,” and narratives of resistance that understand the same history as imperial conquest and genocide. It took a lot of storytelling, a lot of literary labor, to invent a destiny and to make it manifest on landscapes, peoples and nations. This class asks how certain ingredients of the master-narrative of colonial expansion and the American “wild west” – bloodthirsty, sexually dangerous tribal people, violent white outlaws, hard-working normative white families, empty landscapes, easy money – came to be essential to the American myth. And how were those stories resisted and rewritten even as they were being formed? Ultimately, we will interrogate the so-called “frontier,” exposing it as a vastly diverse network of Native-, African- Asian- and Euro-American peoples whose landscapes were already inhabited, already historied, already multinational. Materials examined may include early Indigenous narratives and anonymous writings by white and Indigenous people, and texts and narratives by John Smith, William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Tituba (Carib), Samson Occom (Mohegan), William Appess (Pequot), Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fennimore Cooper, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), Mary Jemison (Seneca), Black Hawk (Sauk), John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Paiute), Wovoka (Paiute), Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain.
ENGL B205 Introduction to Film (1 Unit)
This course is intended to provide students with the tools of critical film analysis. Through readings of images and sounds, sections of films and entire narratives, students will cultivate the habits of critical viewing and establish a foundation for focused work in film studies. The course introduces formal and technical units of cinematic meaning and categories of genre and history that add up to the experiences and meanings we call cinema. Although much of the course material will focus on the Hollywood style of film, examples will be drawn from the history of cinema. Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory.
ENGL B207 Eating Empire: Food, Diaspora and Victorian Britain (1 Unit)
This class will explore British culinary culture across the long nineteenth century, focusing on how food culture was used in the ordering and Othering of the world and its populations. Our lens is the relationship of food to nineteenth-century colonial and imperial discourse and we will analyze how food both traced and guided global networks of power, politics and trade. We will be particularly interested in theorizing the paradox that the trademark English comestibles – the sweet cup of tea, the curry – are colonial imports, and we will also construct a history of the industrialization of food that facilitated exportation. As we are tracing the flows of capital and foodstuffs, we will also consider the power of resisting food, by studying anti-saccharite abolitionist protests, hunger strikes and food adulteration campaigns. Organizing units will include sugar, chocolate, tea, spices. Texts will include slave narratives, nineteenth century cookbooks and colonial culinary memoirs, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Stoker’s Dracula, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
ENGL B208 Studies in Genre: Black Memoir (1 Unit)
This course explores and interrogates the literary genre of memoir. More specifically, it takes up Black memoirs and Black political autobiography, thinking through the overlaps and the differences between these forms. Focusing on the final quarter of the 20th century and the contemporary, readings will include The Autobiography of Angela Davis (1974), Assata: An Autobiography (1987); Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2006); and Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism (2020). What differences structure the memoir of the Black academic and the autobiography of the Black fugitive? Where do these differences collapse in theory and/or in lived experience? The course will delve into late 20th century and contemporary Black political movements and political philosophy as it pertains to these texts.
ENGL B212 Renaissance Erotic Poetry (1 Unit)
Even when it was concerned with elevated topics like religion, politics, or community, Renaissance poetry was deeply embodied, working through abstract topics in frank and fleshy figures. This class will serve as an introduction to Renaissance lyric, focusing on the erotic dimensions of early modern poetics. Along the way, we’ll discuss topics of interest within gender and sexuality studies and queer theory. Authors will include Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Rochester, and Milton.
ENGL B213 Global Cinema (1 Unit)
This course introduces students to one possible history of global cinema. We will discuss and analyze a variety of filmmakers and film movements from around the world. Students will be exposed to the discipline of film studies as it is specifically related to the cinema of East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. We will study these works with special emphasis on film language, aesthetics, and politics, as well as film style and genre. Along the way, we will explore a number of key terms and concepts, including colonialism, postcolonialism, form, realism, surrealism, futurism, orientalism, modernity, postmodernity, hegemony, the subaltern, and globalization. Filmmakers will include, among others, Wong Kar-wai, Satyajit Ray, Shirin Neshat, Fernando Mereilles, Agnès Varda, and Werner Herzog.
ENGL B215 Early Modern Crime Narratives: Vice, Villains, and Law (1 Unit)
This course taps into our continuing collective obsession with criminality, unpacking the complicated web of feelings attached to crime and punishment through early modern literary treatments of villains, scoundrels, predators, pimps, witches, king-killers, poisoners, mobs, and adulterers. By reading literary accounts of vice alongside contemporary and historical theories of criminal justice, we will chart the deep history of criminology and track competing ideas about punishment and the criminal mind. This course pays particular attention the ways that people in this historical moment mapped criminality onto dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, disability, religion, and mental illness according to cultural conventions very different from our own. Authors may include Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, and Behn.
ENGL B217 Narratives of Latinidad (1 Unit)
This course explores how Latina/o writers fashion bicultural and transnational identities and narrate the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America. We will focus on topics of shared concern among Latino groups such as struggles for social justice, the damaging effects of machismo and racial hierarchies, the politics of Spanglish, and the affective experience of migration. By analyzing a range of cultural production, including novels, poetry, testimonial narratives, films, activist art, and essays, we will unpack the complexity of Latinidad in the Americas.
ENGL B219 Virginia Woolf (1 Unit)
This course offers an immersive introduction to the writing, life, and legacy of Virginia Woolf, who is recognized today as one of the most important writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. Our semester-long study of Woolf includes her groundbreaking novels and stories as well as her letters, diaries, essays, and works of literary criticism—or the whole of her prolific, multi-faceted writing life. “What a queer fate it is—,” Woolf wrote in her diary in 1918, “always to be the spectator of the public, never part of it.” Throughout the course, we will attend to Woolf’s “queer fate” as a social outsider and observer of everyday life (or “a snob,” in her own words), a writer, a woman, a chronically ill person, and a queer person; and we will seek to make connections between her life and broader histories, literary movements, and social communities.
ENGL B220 The Teaching of Writing (1 Unit)
This Praxis course is designed for students interested in teaching or tutoring writing at the high-school or college level. The course focuses on current theories of rhetoric and composition, theories of writing and learning, writing pedagogy, and literacy issues. Students will get hands-on experience with curriculum design and lesson planning, strategies for classroom teaching and individual instruction, and will develop digital projects related to multilingual writing and plagiarism. The Praxis components of the course are primarily project-based, but we may also make one or two group visits to local sites where writing is taught.
ENGL B221 Medieval Friendship (1 Unit)
What was Lancelot’s greater sin: committing adultery with Queen Guinevere, or betraying his best friend, King Arthur? While much has been said about courtly love in the middle ages, the value of medieval friendships tends to get overlooked. Medieval life was very communal, meaning individuals often formed relationships for practical, incidental, and personal reasons. In this course, we will examine friendships depicted in medieval literature, asking questions like: Was chivalry just the “Bro Code” for knights? What was the main source of drama in medieval monasteries? How many of Chaucer’s poems pass the Bechdel Test? We will read canonical texts like The Book of Margery Kempe, The Canterbury Tales, and Mallory’s Le Morte D'Arthur alongside recent literary criticism and scholarship from the emerging scholarly field of friendship studies.
ENGL B222 Medieval Indigeneity (1 Unit)
This course reads Middle English texts via Indigenous Studies, asking how we might analyze medieval depictions of sovereignty, landscape, animal life, and time through Indigenous vocabularies and epistemological frameworks. How might we understand settler colonial politics and aesthetics in the Middle Ages?
ENGL B223 The Help: Asian American Literature & Care Work (1 Unit)
This course surveys Asian American literature and cultural productions that feature the work of care: jobs, whether official or unofficial (such as mothering, nursing, and nannying) that are essential, yet so often undercompensated and overlooked. We will examine how Asian American immigration history has led to the burgeoning of industries around care work. We will see how narrative and fiction portray the troubling entanglements between economic structures, race and gender roles, and personal feeling in the labor of care. This course operates under the premise that an attentiveness to how care unfolds is essential to creating a more just world. Collectively, we will not just talk about care as an abstract set of ideas but concretely practice it with one another in the space of our classroom.
ENGL B224 Distant Intimacies (1 Unit)
“How close is too close?” has been a key question during the covid-19 pandemic. It’s also a question that philosophers, writers, and theorists have posed throughout the twentieth century to think through what it means to live together, form communities, and imagine an ethical world. This course will explore ideas of distance and proximity in twentieth-century literature and theory, with a focus on queer theories of the social world, exile/belonging, friendship, temporality, and affect. Among the questions we will ask are: What are the conditions of intimacy? What (queer) forms can intimacy take? Where and when do intimate bonds require distance, even absence? Additional topics include virtual and diasporic intimacies, poets in correspondence, and ecocritical approaches to living together.
ENGL B227 Trans Shakespeare (1 Unit)
Everyone knows that Shakespeare’s plays are chock-full of moments of gender trouble. Whether it is the fact of cross-dressing on stages that prohibited women actors or the episodes where already cross-dressed boy actors played men, the early modern stage reveled in the instability of gender and its performance. Less known, however, are the rich debates and theories about sex, gender, and sexuality that were going on at the time and that informed the performance of gender on Shakespeare’s stage. Indeed, three years before the publication of Shakespeare’s first folio, or collected works, a pamphlet debate between Hic Mulier (the man-woman) and Haec Vir (the womanish man) raged, bringing social anxieties about cross-dressing, sexuality, women, and masculinity to the fore of bookstall debate. This course will delve into Shakespeare’s works and put them in context in the landscape of early modern theories of gender and sexuality. Moreover, this course will engage contemporary scholarship, to re-situate our approach to gender and sexuality in Shakespeare within a trans-critical framework, moving away from gender binarism in our approach to questions of gender in early modern literature. Readings include Ben Jonson’s Epicene, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merchant of Venice, and Henry VI Part I, and a selection of criticism and theory.
ENGL B228 Post-Nuclear Literature and Film (1 Unit)
Since the first nuclear explosions rocked the world in 1945, from the Indigenous lands of New Mexico to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, literature and film have had to reckon with the fact that the potential destructions of the literary archive—not to mention the world itself—no longer required divine intervention or literary speculation: apocalypse had moved from the realm of fiction to the realm of fact. Since that day, fiction and film have explored the impact these weapons have had on politics, the environment, and billions of lifeforms, human and nonhuman alike. By reading such works, we’ll consider the nuclear not only as an isolated event but as a continuous process, from the extraction of uranium on Indigenous lands, to production and testing, to the accumulation of nuclear materials and waste. We’ll also explore how novels and films have had to contort their forms to properly represent the time-bending reality of the bomb, by looking at Indigenous novels from both the Americas and the Pacific, Japanese historical fiction and monster movies, major Hollywood productions, Soviet cinema, and postmodern fiction. Students will leave the class with a sense of the nuclear issue’s past and ongoing importance while practicing and learning literary and film analysis. Likely authors include Masuji Ibuse, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Albert Wendt, and likely films include Godzilla, Hiroshima mon amour, Oppenheimer, Stalker, and footage of nuclear testing itself.
ENGL B229 Apocalypse Then: Medieval Literature at the End of the World (1 Unit)
Doomsday forecasting is far from a modern phenomenon; medieval writers devoted significant attention in religious, naturalistic, and literary texts portending the end of the world. This course examines apocalyptic themes in major works of medieval literature, considering both texts explicitly about the end of the world as well as those treating the Four Riders from the Book of Revelation: Famine, War, Pestilence, and Death. Texts will include selections from Langland’s Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Shewings, Dante’s Purgatorio, and Gower’s Vox Clamantis. Prior knowledge of Middle English is not required.
ENGL B231 Horror Film (1 Unit)
How has cinema visualized monsters, death, spectral presences, and all that is beyond human comprehension? How (and why) has it sought to elicit fear, revulsion, and horror from its viewers? In this class, we’ll explore these and other questions through a broad survey of the horror film across cinematic history. We’ll consider a wide range of films and subgenres, including gothic silent films, “golden age” monster movies, 80s slasher films, and found footage horror. We’ll also watch contemporary examples of how filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Matt Farley have used the horror genre to produce independent, original, and critically acclaimed movies in an era dominated by franchises and high budgets. We’ll pay particular attention to how the vampires, zombies, killers, and victims of horror are racialized, gendered, and classed, showing us how horror seeks (and often fails) to contain societal fears and anxieties within the realm of the fantastic. Likely films will include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Night of the Living Dead, Get Out, and A Girl Walks Home at Night, among others. This course presumes no prior knowledge of film studies, and we’ll read film criticism and scholarship to learn how to think, talk, and write about movies generally and horror films specifically. CW: Given the subject of the course, we will be watching a number of films that include disturbing or frightening imagery or themes. That said, the professor will happily provide content warnings on specific topics or themes if desired.
ENGL B232 Race on Film: From Student Movements to BLM (1 Unit)
This course will introduce students to cinematic representations of and engagements with race since the late 1960s. In the years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the student movements of the late 1960s, struggles for racial justice evolved in response to the development of new “colorblind” forms of oppression and the persistence of racial and economic inequality in spite of the Civil Rights movement’s significant political victories. Filmmakers of color experimented with how best to represent and intervene in this struggle while Hollywood production companies sought to incorporate racial difference into their market share. We will watch a large variety of films, with a particular focus on Black cinema, from documentaries of the 1960s social movements, to early Blaxploitation films, to the L.A. Rebellion, to contemporary responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, alongside examples of Asian-American cinema, Chicanx cinema, New Queer Cinema, and Indigenous science fiction. We will ask questions about the importance and limitations of representation, the relationship between political movements and art, and the intersections of race with gender, sexuality, and economic class. We will pair short theoretical and critical readings with films by, among others, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Cheryl Duyne, Spike Lee, Gregory Nava, and Wayne Wang.
ENGL B233 The Empire Within: British Domestic Colonialisms (1 Unit)
This course will explore the proposition that in Victorian Britain, colonization was a domestic as well as foreign policy. Not only were Britain’s Celtic peripheries (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall) made subject to English land seizures and extractivist practices, but citizens of these domestic colonies were routinely pressed into military and bureaucratic subaltern service in the empire abroad. Some Victorians also believed that colonialism should begin at home: we will trace the histories of pauper emigration, convict transportation, and the philanthropic “home colony” movement which sought to establish farm colonies to develop agricultural skills and moral character in the urban poor. The word “colonialism” finds its roots in colonnus (farmer) and colere (cultivation); we will ask how land and culture were yoked together in the imperial project, and also trace how race, class, gender and sexuality shaped and were shaped by empire. Topics will include religion, ecology, revolution, industrialization, feminism, eugenics and Anglo-Saxon Reunionism. Authors will include canonical authors such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker, and lesser-known Celtic, non-white, and working-class authors.
ENGL B235 Five American Women Poets (1 Unit)
How did American women come to poetic voice under conditions that demanded their artistic, personal and political silence? And when they did come to voice, what did they say and how did they say it? Is it possible to think about an American poetic tradition through the experience of diverse people writing under the sign and conditions of womanhood? This course examines five poets writing in five very different circumstances. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was a white Puritan whose faith demanded silence but whose artistry demanded voice. Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was born in West Africa and stolen as a child to Boston where she was enslaved. When she began writing poetry as a teenager it was variously hailed as the work of a prodigy and condemned as fraudulent. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-1842) was an Ojibwe woman whose white husband both solicited and crushed her poetic voice. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a white, radically innovative queer poet who almost entirely eschewed publication. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was a free Black poet, novelist and journalist who attempted to use the sentimental mode to convince white and Black readers to rise up, first against slavery and then in defense of free Black equality. This course will explore each poet in depth, while engaging the broader question of the relationship of poetry to personal and political self-realization.
ENGL B237 Cultural Memory and State-Sanctioned Violence in Latinx Literature (1 Unit)
This course examines how Latinx literature grapples with state-sanctioned violence, cultural memory, and struggles for justice in the Americas. Attending to the histories of dictatorship and civil war in Central and South America, we will focus on a range of genres—including novels, memoir, poetry, film, and murals—to explore how memory and the imagination can contest state-sanctioned violence, how torture and disappearances haunt the present, how hetereopatriarchal and white supremacist discourses are embedded in authoritarian regimes, and how U.S. imperialism has impacted undocumented migration. Throughout the course we will analyze the various creative techniques Latinx cultural producers use to resist violence and imagine justice.
ENGL B241 God in America: Literatures 1620-1865 (1 Unit)
This course proposes that to understand American literature, we must understand American Protestantism. Only a century after Martin Luther nailed his theses to a German church door, the Mayflower disgorged its radical separatist passengers into “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men,” aka Cape Cod, where they set up the social and religious experiment remembered as “Puritanism.” Their colony would become, they promised, a “City on a Hill.” Many other sects followed, and soon those who came for other reasons encountered a Protestant battle over America in full swing. On the one hand, Protestant challenges to social, racial, gender and political hierarchy promised unimaginable freedoms and inspired radical social change; on the other hand, Protestant arguments underwrote slavery and settler-colonial violence, gender oppression, and ecological devastation. This course begins with the Puritans, ends with the Civil War, and examines literature by white, Black and Indigenous writers grappling, from inside and outside of faith, with the question of how to live in and change God’s America.
ENGL B243 Disease and Discourse (1 Unit)
When did “consumption” become “tuberculosis”? What does it mean when someone calls COVID-19 the “China Virus?” As human beings are confronted with novel contagions, we are also forced to grapple with the psychological and cultural impact that these illnesses have on our societies; the words we use to describe these diseases matter. In this course, we will examine literature produced during significant historical epidemics, including: divine punishment and early Christian views of leprosy; apocalypticism and the Black Death; the moralization of the AIDS crisis, and the “unprecedented times” of COVID. Readings will include such texts as Bocaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s The Journal of a Plague Year, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Guided by work by critics like Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor) and contemporary scholarship in disability studies, trauma theory, and narrative medicine, we will take an interdisciplinary approach to textual production and genre, putting medical, religious, literary, and historical texts in conversation in order to better understand their reciprocal influences. Along the way, we will consider: How does language affect our perception of diseases and those who contract them?
ENGL B244 Victorian Childhoods (1 Unit)
This course will examine the explosion of interest in the figure of the child that occurred in Britain over the course of the nineteenth century. The Victorian era, marked by rapid industrialization, social reform, and evolving notions of morality, saw childhood emerge as a distinct phase of life requiring protection, education, and moral development. We'll move chronologically, comparing classic depictions of children in literature from the Romantic and Victorian periods with a range of other textual materials (philanthropic tracts; excerpts from government “Blue Books”; legal and medical writings; newspaper scandal stories;) in our attempts to understand some of the very different ways in which the child came to be defined in this era. We'll be especially attentive to questions of race, class and gender. Possible authors may include: Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, William Blake, Arthur Morrison, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, J.M. Barrie, and others.
ENGL B245 Literature in the Digital Age (1 Unit)
This course introduces students to the digital culture of the United States, primarily after 1945. What is the fate of literature in an era of vast digital technology and endlessly accumulating information? How do authors depict a world—full of invisible algorithms and hidden data centers—that seems resistant to representation? In our search for answers, we will also track the rise of computing from its U.S. military origins to its contemporary ubiquity, and we will consider both the digital’s influence on literature and the ways literature helps produce our cultural sense of what the digital is.
ENGL B246 The Global Middle Ages (1 Unit)
We start with the question: when and where were the Middle Ages, exactly? Perhaps what comes to most people's minds isn't the right answer at all! This course offers students an introduction to the medieval period as a time of active cultural exchange, racial imaginaries, and decentralized globality. We will explore what it means to think about history on a global scale, how to broaden our understanding of the Middle Ages without replicating Eurocentric perspectives, and how literary texts work to mediate history instead of merely reflecting it. Further, we will consider how the definition of the medieval has been politically weaponized in our current moment, and what is at stake in resisting such delimitations. Texts may include the Book of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the King of Tars. No previous experience with medieval literature required.
ENGL B247 Introduction to 20th Century African American Literature (1 Unit)
This survey course is an introduction to some of the major authors, canonical texts, and defining critical debates of African American literature from 1899-1989. Selected authors will include Angelina Grimké, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison. Contending with the entanglements of socio-political and aesthetic questions the course will explore the following themes: the roots of African American literature as a “peasant” literature; the role of white funders and audiences in African American literature; racial uplift ideology and the politics of class; questions of gender and sexuality; the Black Arts Movement; geographical (urban vs rural) divides and ecological elements of the tradition. The course will revolve around close-reading and (written) interpretation within (and beyond) the historical and literary context of the works in question. Readings include novels, short stories, poetry, drama, autobiography and essays from across the 20th century. The course is open to all and assumes no prior knowledge of African American literature.
ENGL B248 Writing Everyday Life (1 Unit)
This course explores the fascination with everyday life—and how to portray it—in twentieth-century and contemporary poetry and fiction. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, everyday life is what escapes. Yet everyday life is often the thing a writer most wants to put on paper. What is at stake for writers in paying attention to everyday life in the present? How can we understand extreme political, social, and environmental conditions as embedded in everyday life? How can we, as writers and citizens, pay attention to these conditions when they are everywhere and systemic? Students will have the chance to experiment with forms of everyday life-writing such as the inventory, the lunch-hour poem, the diary entry, and the letter; no prior experience with these forms is needed, and the course is open to all. Likely authors include Annie Ernaux, Claire Keegan, Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankine, Kathryn Scanlan, and Christina Sharpe.
ENGL B249 Pre-Modern Women Writers: Gender, Sex, and Literary Culture (1 Unit)
This course is a survey of some of the most influential pre-modern women writing in English and of literary culture in an age of transition. As the late medieval world gives way and shape to the early modern, how does women’s literary culture shift, adapt, and respond to these changes? Just as importantly: how does women’s writing contest and realize changing notions of femininity? This course interrogates the ever-unstable category of woman, the relationship between the advent of colonialism and women’s writing, the expansion of capitalism and the sequestering of women’s domestic and reproductive labor, and the rich relationship between faith and gender. We begin the course with Marie de France’s Lais (1150-1170) and conclude with Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko or the Royal Slave (1688). Other readings include Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe, Mary Sidney, Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Sylvia Frederici’s Caliban and the Witch. No previous experience with early modern literature is needed.
ENGL B250 Methods of Literary Study (1 Unit)
We will explore the power of language in a variety of linguistic, historical, disciplinary, social, and cultural contexts, focusing on the power of the written word to provide a foundational basis for the critical and creative analysis of literary studies. This course will help to broaden our ideas of what texts and language accomplish socially, historically, and aesthetically. Students will thus refine their faculties of reading closely, writing incisively and passionately, asking productive questions, producing their own compelling interpretations, and listening to the insights offered by others. Prerequisite: One English course or permission of instructor. English Majors and Minors must take this class before their senior year. Not appropriate for freshmen.
ENGL B261 Colonizing Girlhoods: L.M.Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilde (1 Unit)
This class explores what we can see anew when we juxtapose two iconic figures of North American children’s literature: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fictionalized self-portrait, Laura Ingalls. Both characters have risen to mythic proportions in their respective countries, and are powerful signs in an international culture industry. After setting up key eighteenth-century concepts and contexts for what French historian Philippe Ariès calls the "invention of childhood”, we will explore the ways in which images of young girls have been deployed as the benign faces of ruthless imperialism, reading through the entirety of each original series. We will track the geographical movement of both heroines, with particular attention to different spatial narratives of nationhood and empire-building, whether manifest destiny in the U.S., or what critic Northrop Frye has termed the “garrison mentality” of Canadian culture. Here we’ll be especially attentive to commonalities in how both authors produce class-stratified and racialized notions of girlhood, as well as divergences in how both countries, each still framed to varying degrees as the “infant nation” of Great Britain, yield new and evolving discourses of girlhood.
ENGL B262 Reading Medicine Before Modernity (1 Unit)
Long before the advent of germ theory or the establishment of medical schools, people were practicing medicine. Armed with the best information available to them in their own historical period, these early practitioners and thinkers wrote about their experiences, theories, and observations, many of which made their way into broader public consciousness. This course investigates pre-modern understandings of the body by considering the literature produced in light of these early medical theories. Topics will include: humorism, miasma theory, astrological medicine (iatromathematics), two-seed reproduction, lovesickness, melancholia, and the mind/body continuum. Readings will draw from both non-fiction documents and literary texts spanning the ancient period to the present day, including work from Aristotle, Guy de Chauliac, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jeanette Winterson, and more.
ENGL B266 Oscar Wilde and His Circle (1 Unit)
Oscar Wilde embodied contradictions. He was an Irishman who embraced English life, a husband to a woman and a lover to many men, an author who wrote in all genres, a celebrity, a wit, a journalist and editor, a socialist and a decadent, a beloved and loathed exile and martyr. At his height, he was one of the most celebrated writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and he played a huge role in the shaping of the literary and cultural aesthetics of the 1890s. Then, after a brutal and sensational trial for “acts of gross indecency” with men, followed by 2 years in a prison cell, he became a byword for homosexuality and its perils. Everyone knew, or knew about, Oscar. This course will trace his artistic and sexual networks, his friendships, his rivalries, and his afterlives. Topics will include: Wilde, feminism and fashion; Wilde, aestheticism and America; Wilde and incarceration; Wilde and race. Alongside selections from his drama, poetry, essays and fiction, we will read work by the women who formed part of his literary circle (Ouida, Amy Levy, Michael Field), the sexual philosophers who influenced or were influenced by him (Walter Pater, Aleister Crowley, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter), and learn why Henry James was an enemy, and Lord Alfred Douglas a very bad boyfriend indeed.
ENGL B267 Theories of the Image (1 Unit)
Our contemporary world contains a seemingly endless amount of images, from television and cinema to the jpegs, gifs, and memes of social media and the internet, but this was not always the case. This class will consider how theorists and philosophers reckoned with the rise of the image and the birth of “image culture.” What exactly is an image? What happens when an image can be reproduced and disseminated at unimagined speeds? What happens when that image moves? What sort of gazes does the image produce, and what are the social and political power of such gazes? We will pay particular attention to how the invention of cinema changed the meaning of the image at the end of the 19th century and how, in turn, the end of World War II (with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the discovery of the Nazi’s extermination camps) challenged the meaning of cinema, undermining its supposed ability to show us what was “real.” In asking these and related questions, this course will provide students with a robust understanding of film theory and of different theoretical and historical approaches to the image. We will consider a wide range of methods—including Marxism, critical race theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis—and view a number of photographic, cinematic, and digital images against which we can test these theories. Fulfills Film Studies Theory course requirement
ENGL B270 American Girl: Childhood in U.S. Literatures, 1690-1935 (1 Unit)
This course will focus on the “American Girl” as a particularly contested model for the nascent American. Through examination of religious tracts, slave and captivity narratives, literatures for children and adult literatures about childhood, we will analyze U. S. investments in girlhood as a site for national self-fashioning.
ENGL B271 Transatlantic Childhoods in the 19th Century (1 Unit)
This class explores what we can see anew when we juxtapose American and British experiences of, and responses to, emergent ideas and ideals of childhood in the child-obsessed nineteenth century. After setting up key eighteenth-century concepts and contexts for what French historian Philippe Ariès called the "invention of childhood," we'll explore the ways in which children came to be defined between 1800 and 1900, in relation to such categories as law, labor, education, sex, play, and psychology, through examinations of both "literary" works and texts and artifacts from a range of other discourses and spheres. We'll move between American and British examples, aiming to track the commonalities at work in the two nations and the effects of marked structural differences. Here we'll be especially attentive to chattel slavery in the U.S., and to the relations, and non-relations, between the racialized notions of childhood produced in this country and those which arise out of Britain's sharply stratified class landscape. If race and class are produced differently, we'll also consider the degree to which British and American histories and representations of boyhood and girlhood converge and diverge across the period. We’ll close with reflections on the ways in which a range of literary genres on the cusp of modernism form themselves in and through the new discourses of childhood and evolving figures of the child.
ENGL B277 Speculative Futures, Alternative Worlds (1 Unit)
Just as colonization is an act of speculative fiction, imagining and violently imposing a different world, so too does decolonization rely on the power of imagination. This course will explore how Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Asian American cultural producers deploy speculative fiction to interrogate white supremacy and imperialism and to imagine decolonial futures. We will analyze representations of racism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, environmental destruction, and anti-immigrant discrimination in works by writers, filmmakers, and artists such as Octavia Butler, Sabrina Vourvoulias, N.K. Jemison, Ken Liu, Alex Rivera, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, as well as anthologies such as Walking the Clouds and Nets for Snaring the Sun. In doing so, we will probe the role that literature, film, and graphic narratives can play in decolonizing knowledge. Students will be also introduced to key theoretical concepts such as modernity/coloniality; ethnic futurisms (Afro-Futurism, Latinxfuturism, Indigenous Futurism, etc.); marvelous realism; survivance, and social death that will help them unpack the critical work accomplished by genre fiction and query the ways in which the aesthetic imagination can contribute to social justice.
ENGL B281 The Revolutionary Imagination in Philadelphia 1750-1826 (1 Unit)
In “The Revolutionary Imagination in Philadelphia, 1750-1826” we will ask how the American Revolution was represented as it unfolded, not only by the obvious characters (Jefferson, Franklin, et al), but by everyday Philadelphias who may or may not have been invested in the conflict, and around whom a world event was unfolding. We will read a combination of materials as “literature,” expanding our literary analysis to include, in addition to poetry and plays, law, political pamphlets, sermons, newspapers, architecture and other cultural ephemera. Class will be discussion-based but we will also take several field trips into the city to visit historical sites and archives, especially those important to Black and feminist histories of the Revolution. We will also consider the afterlife of the Revolution in the contemporary city, paying close attention to issues of monumentality and diversity of representation (or lack thereof).
ENGL B287 Food Cultures in Philadelphia (1 Unit)
Philadelphia has an exceptionally rich dining culture. “Jeet yet?” is a common refrain in a city that boasts African American, Italian and German communities of long standing, and more recent, culinarily impactful settlement by East Asian and Mexican populations. This course will explore the deep history of dining in Philadelphia, from Lenape foodways to the skills of Hercules Posey – George Washington’s enslaved chef – to the recent participation of Philadelphia cooks and restauranteurs in social justice movements. Topics will engage cross-cultural and cross-temporal questions such as immigration, religion and food, Philadelphia’s place at the center of local and global networks of production and extraction, social dining clubs vs home cooking, the shifting history of street markets, publishing culture and the recipe book, false abundance and food deserts.
ENGL B288 Autotheory: An Introduction (1 Unit)
Encompassing hybrid forms of writing that make use of everyday life, the autobiographical, and the personal to do invested critical work, autotheory (self + theory) is a genre that’s hard to pin down. What defines this trending genre and for whom has it been useful? What can autotheory do that other forms of writing cannot? How does autotheory challenge our ideas about what constitutes authoritative knowledge and whose thinking counts as theory? Why has autotheory flourished in the fields of queer, trans, and disability studies? We begin by exploring the feminist roots of autotheory in work by Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Carolyn Steedman, and others before we turn to more recent examples: Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence, Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory, Johanna Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory,” Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.
ENGL B289 Topics in the Ellery Yale Wood Collection (1 Unit)
This is a topics course built around current strengths in the Ellery Yale Wood children's book collection of Special Collections. Course content varies from semester to semester.
ENGL B290 History & Theory: The Afterlives of Slavery (1 Unit)
This course will introduce students to contemporary and historical debates on New World chattel slavery with an emphasis on what Saidiya Hartman has coined as “the afterlives” of slavery. With Hartman’s groundbreaking historical and theoretical work, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 19th Century America (1997), as well as her memoir, Lose Your Mother (2006) as foundational texts, we will explore the applications, implications, and limits of this framework for understanding the structural position and lived experience(s) of Black persons in and beyond the present-day United States. Course readings will also include the work of Black sociologists, Marxist historians, and creative writers, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Orlando Patterson, Dorothy Roberts, Frank Wilderson, and Christina Sharpe. Course questions include: What is the relationship between the enslaved past and the present for persons of African descent in and beyond the U.S? How does blackness inflect would-be universal categories such as “the human” or “the worker?” What does it mean to think racial slavery as a relation alongside or in addition to its being thought as an event?
ENGL B293 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Medieval Ecologies (1 Unit)
This course explores relationships between natural, non-human, and human agents in the Middle Ages. Reading natural philosophy, vernacular literature, and theological treatises, we examine how the Middle Ages understood supposedly "modern" environmental concepts like climate change, sustainability, animal rights, and protected land.
ENGL B294 Iranian Cinema: Before and After the Revolution (1 Unit)
One of the most celebrated global cinemas to date, Iranian cinema has been recognized in film festivals around the world for its unique aesthetic vision, political complexities, and social import. This course will expose students to major masterpieces of Iranian cinema both prior to and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Along the way, students will learn to meaningfully engage topics such as film form, colonialism, imperialism, labor migration, realism, expressionism, and issues concerning the politics of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.
ENGL B295 Race and the Victorians (1 Unit)
The Victorian period is often misconceived as the whitest of literary eras. This course rereads Victorian narratives as deeply entangled with and respondent to slavery and invested in and constitutive of racializing systems that still inform the world today. We will ask how writers, thinkers, and subjects of the British nineteenth century theorised race and nation. We will pay particular attention to intersections of racial thinking with class, gender and imperialism. Texts will include domestic novels, slave narratives, abolitionist poetry and prose, travelogues, and colonial policy documents. A key goal of the course will be challenging the notion that Victorian society was white, homogenous and uniformly imperialist; we will engage the writing of Black and Brown Britons, and others who took anti-colonial stands. We will also engage contemporary theory that helps us deal with the limits of both canon and archive.
ENGL B299 W.B. Yeats & Gwendolyn Brooks: Reading the Poetic Career (1 Unit)
W.B. Yeats and Gwendolyn Brooks were both radical, experimental poets whose careers included multiple important phases, each marked by its own political and aesthetic commitments. Focusing on just two writers in depth allows for serious consideration of how and why their work changed over the course of their lives, and of what it means to read such diverse bodies of work “as a whole.” What changes when we focus not just on an individual poem or book but on a poet’s entire career? And what might each of these two very different poetic careers teach us about the other? We will consider the thematic and technical developments and relationships between Yeats and Brooks as well as reading about the important cultural contexts and movements that shaped them, including the Irish Literary Revival and the Black Arts Movement, the struggles for Irish independence and American Civil Rights, mysticism, feminism, Black Power, internationalism, and literary Modernism.
ENGL B302 Moby Dick (1 Unit)
“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” Ishmael muses as he tries to understand the monomaniacal hunt that drives Captain Ahab and his crew of whalers of every race and creed to their watery doom. Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby Dick and historical and critical materials surrounding it, will be the entire subject of this course. An allegory of a nation charging toward Civil War, a nation founded on ideals of freedom and equality, but built on capitalist expansion, white supremacy, slavery and genocide, Moby Dick is hailed by many (and many who have never read it) as “The Great American Novel.” But which America, whose America? Written for the generation that would fight the Civil War, how does this novel continue to describe America, today? By turns comic, tragic, epic, mundane, thuddingly literal and gorgeously spiritual and metaphysical, the novel rewards both intricate close reading and intense historical and critical analysis. We will take up questions of race, gender and sexuality, colonialism, the animal and the human, the oceanic, freedom, individuality, totalitarianism, capitalism, nation and belonging. Students will write a midterm and a final research paper.
ENGL B305 Early Modern Trans Studies (1 Unit)
This course will consider the deep histories of transgender embodiment by exploring literary, historical, medical, and religious texts from the Renaissance. Expect to read about alchemical hermaphrodites, gender-swapping angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, female husbands, trans saints, criminal transvestites, and genderqueer monks. We will consider together how these early modern texts speak to the historical, theoretical, and political concerns that animate contemporary trans studies. We will read texts by Crashaw, Donne, Shakespeare, Lyly, and Dekker as well as Susan Stryker, Dean Spade, Mel Chen, Paul Preciado, and Kadji Amin. Prerequisite: Students must have completed at least one 200-level class.
ENGL B307 Literature in and of Philadelphia, 1682-1865 (1 Unit)
Love and freedom are words that constantly intertwine in the literatures of Philadelphia’s self-fashioning. Known, of course, as the City of Brotherly Love, William Penn’s projected utopia of religious freedom was, before the Civil War, the hotbed of political, racial, cultural and sexual revolution. The city where, in the shadow of plague and rising racism, the first non-violent Civil Rights protests took place and where Black Americans forged a literature of both freedom and beloved community. A city where, under lenient Quaker law, marriage laws allowed for greater sexual freedom than elsewhere in the country, where women were better educated than anywhere else in the world, and where experiments in gender equality and indeed, gender diversity, were able to proceed in relative peace. In this course, and in the city itself, we will examine literature written in and about Philadelphia before the Civil War, exploring how and why Philadelphians engaged questions of love, freedom and non-freedom. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program and make use of the city’s archives, museums and historical sites.
ENGL B312 Religion, Sex, and Revolution in Milton's Paradise (1 Unit)
Paradise Lost, John Milton's epic poem about the battle between Heaven and Hell, was first published in 1673. It has remained one of the most influential works of English Literature, fostering fascinating debates about spirituality, revolution, gender and sexuality. Milton's poem is a window into the complicated theological frameworks that shape his understanding of bodies, desires, freedoms, and, of course, the shortcomings of our fallen selves. This course will allow students to dive deep into one of the greatest poems ever written. Does Milton's epic poem unwittingly celebrate Satan's revolt against the tyranny of an absolutist god and turn Satan into a sexy freedom-fighting hero? Does the epic intend to reveal the seductiveness of fantasies of sexual and political freedom, luring readers in to be, as one Miltonist would have it, "Surprised by Sin?" At stake in this class are the competing interests of Milton's personal and spiritual politics, the complex interactions between spiritual and revolutionary discourses, and the entanglement of secular, sexual love and religious faith.
ENGL B313 The Art of Minor Feelings: Asian American Emotional Lives (1 Unit)
In her essay collection Minor Feelings (2020), Cathy Park Hong argues that Asian Americans experience a “racialized range of emotions”—what she calls “minor feelings”—when their concerns about racial injustice are repeatedly dismissed as inconsequential. What do emotions have to do with Asian American history and identity? And how do we talk about emotions critically? This seminar revolves around the cultural history of affect for Asian Americans in a variety of contemporary literary works by Asian Americans since the 90s including essays, short stories, novels, and genre fiction. Over the course of the semester, we will learn to understand and critically analyze affect—or feelings and emotions—in ways that are not just psychic and personal but also embodied and socially, politically, and historically specific. We will examine different affective states (e.g., anger, disgust, and detachment but also the beautiful and joyous), considering how specific affects have contributed to the stereotyping of Asian Americans both as unassimilable foreign threats (the Yellow Peril) and as idealized, upwardly mobile American citizens (model minorities). More importantly, we will explore how Asian Americans themselves have used affects to challenge and exceed the categorizations that have been laid out for them
ENGL B315 Reading Childhood Through the Brontës (1 Unit)
Recently, the field of childhood studies has seen a move from considering texts about children to an increased focus on texts authored by children. This theoretical turn complicates longstanding questions relating to the ethics of representing young people, opening up new frameworks for understanding agency and self-fashioning by children. This class will take up these emergent questions via the works of one family. The Brontës’ texts offer a remarkable nexus for considering these critical concerns. Novels such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre offer powerful evocations of the interior lives of children, while Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as well as Charlotte’s Villette are unsparing in their depictions of the labor and pain of childrearing. Yet the family’s juvenile productions—minutely scripted in tiny handmade books—are integral to their mythologizing in contemporary British culture. In this class, we will take the Brontë family as a case study in an effort to understand some of the very different ways childhood came to be understood in the nineteenth century. In addition to the novels and mature poetry, we will read substantial pieces of the juvenilia (including work by Branwell Brontë), such as Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, as well as the Diary Papers and assorted letters. We will situate these literary works alongside a range of other textual materials (philanthropic tracts; excerpts from government “Blue Books”; legal and medical writings; newspaper scandal stories; etc.). Moreover, we will consider the place of this family’s historical childhood in the flourishing present-day Brontë industry, where visitors to Haworth Parsonage are invited to craft their own “tiny book” before purchasing embroidery kits replicating the sisters’ schoolgirl samplers. We will ask: where does juvenilia fit into an author’s corpus? How do we in fact distinguish juvenilia from ostensibly mature works, particularly in the case of such a short-lived family? How have narratives about the child geniuses informed interpretations of the women’s tales of childhood?
ENGL B321 Metropolitan Forms and Fictions (1 Unit)
Urban life is a definitive feature of modernity. As people moved from rural areas and from other countries into increasingly large cities, ways of life modernized: how people earned a living, what kinds of communities they formed, the gendered and sexual identities that became newly possible and legible, the spaces people inhabited and how they moved through them. These and other aspects of urban life shaped literary expression. This course will examine modern and contemporary works about metropolitan experience, by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, and Mohsin Hamid. Topics to be explored include flânerie, anonymity, migrations, chance and repetition, and visibility and (dis)connection.
ENGL B322 Black Marxism (1 Unit)
This seminar course is for students who wish to deepen their understanding of Marxist historiography and theory in and beyond literary and cultural studies. In addition to the work of Marx and classical Marxist thinkers, we will engage the work of a range of Marxist feminists as we explore the contours of Western radicalism. We’ll also explore the overlaps of Marxism and black radicalism through two key texts: Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) and Clyde Woods’s Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (2017).
ENGL B331 Queer Theory (1 Unit)
Queer theory emerged in the early 90s as an academic field committed to studying queer experiences of gender, sexuality, and desire. Early queer theorists established the field’s opposition not just to heterosexual privilege, homophobia, and the normal but also to so-called proper objects of analysis and critique. In this class, we study the history, present, and future of this field, and we interrogate its power at a moment when some of its basic assertions are being disregarded and teachers in some states risk their jobs if they acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. Texts will include movement documents, manifestos, poems, artworks, and films in addition to works of theory by writers like Anzaldúa, Berlant, Butler, Ferguson, Halberstam, Love, Muñoz, Puar, Rubin, Sedgwick, Spillers, Warner, and others.
ENGL B332 Early Modern Race, Empire and the Invention of the News (1 Unit)
“The News” – the idea that things are happening and everyone should know about it through easily accessible media – defines our highly networked lives today. Our relationship to news, however, is quite fraught: anxieties about the veracity of our sources and the supposed objectivity of writers abound. But “news”, and the chief anxieties associated with the form, enjoy a long history. News is often associated with the birth of democracy, the nation, and the public sphere. “The news” has also played an often overlooked and greatly understudied role in the promulgation of theories of race, the expansion of empire, and the development of capitalism. This course offers a rethinking of the history of news beginning in the sixteenth century, revealing the genre’s debts to travel writing, literary culture, and popular print (including ballads and pamphlets). While this course aims to chronicle the history of news, it also moves to tell the histories of colonialism from the masses of popular print that document, debate, and disseminate its histories. Among the questions this course will interrogate are: what is the relationship between early news and literature? How does empire catalyze information culture? How do early debates around race and colonialism shape the emergence of what we might recognize as news culture? Readings include Thomas More’s Utopia, Bartholomew de las Casas’ Brief History, Cortez’s Five Letters, Hakluyt’s Principal Voyages, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Tempest, Ben Jonson’s masques and Staple of News, Aphra Behn’s Widow Ranter, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and a selection of early modern pamphlets, ballads, and criticism.
ENGL B333 Lesbian Immortal (1 Unit)
Lesbian literature has repeatedly figured itself in alliance with tropes of immortality and eternity. Using recent queer theory on temporality, and 19th and 20th century primary texts, we will explore topics such as: fame and noteriety; feminism and mythology; epistemes, erotics and sexual seasonality; the death drive and the uncanny; fin de siecle manias for mummies and seances.
ENGL B336 Topics in Film (1 Unit)
This is a topics course and description varies according to the topic.
ENGL B337 Modernism and the Ordinary (1 Unit)
Modernism is consistently aligned with innovation: making things new and making things strange. Yet modernist writing is preoccupied with habit, repetition, sameness, boredom, and the banal—with “things happening, normally, all the time,” as Virginia Woolf once put it. This course explores the modernist fascination with the ordinary, from the objects in a kitchen to the rhythms of a day. Our primary task will be to understand the stakes of paying attention to the ordinary world for queer and women modernist writers, whose work reveals the ordinary as a site of deep ambivalence as well as possibility. Likely authors include: Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys.
ENGL B339 Latina/o Culture and the Art of Migration (1 Unit)
Gloria Anzaldúa has famously described the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound and the border culture that arises from this fraught site as a third country. This course will explore how Chicana/os and Latina/os creatively represent different kinds of migrations across geo-political borders and between cultural traditions to forge transnational identities and communities. We will use cultural production as a lens for understanding how citizenship status, class, gender, race, and language shape the experiences of Latin American migrants and their Latina/o children. We will also analyze alternative metaphors and discourses of resistance that challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric and reimagine the place of undocumented migrants and Latina/os in contemporary U.S. society. Over the course of the semester, we will probe the role that literature, art, film, and music can play in the struggle for migrants’ rights and minority civil rights, querying how the imagination and aesthetics can contribute to social justice. We will examine a number of different genres, as well as read and apply key theoretical texts on the borderlands and undocumented migration.
ENGL B340 Iranian Cinema: Before and After the Revolution (1 Unit)
One of the most celebrated global cinemas to date, Iranian cinema has been recognized in film festivals around the world for its unique aesthetic vision, political complexities, and social import. This course will expose students to major masterpieces of Iranian cinema both prior to and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Along the way, students will learn to meaningfully engage topics such as film form, colonialism, imperialism, labor migration, realism, expressionism, and issues concerning the politics of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.
ENGL B342 The Queer Middle Ages (1 Unit)
This course examines medieval queer history, focusing on literary depictions of non-normative sexual identities and expressions. From monastic vows of celibacy to same-sex erotic love, from constructions of female virginity to trans identity, the Middle Ages conceptualized sexuality in a range of ways and with a range of attached assumptions and anxieties. Readings will include chivalric romance, rules for monks, cross-dressing saints' lives, and legal tracts worried about unmarried women.
ENGL B343 Sex, Sin, and the Sacred in Medieval Literature (1 Unit)
Rather than being at odds with the church, sex and sexuality was an integral part of medieval concepts of sanctity. Even as the church attempted to regulate sexual behavior, it was also deeply invested in the relationship between the divine and the corporeal, including meditation upon the frankly erotic Song of Songs; the question of Mary’s virginity and motherhood; hagiographic accounts of cross-dressing saints; and the feminization of Christ’s body. This course will explore three concepts-- sex, sin, and the sacred-- and their interrelationship during the medieval period. We will investigate the complex and often contradictory ways that sex was understood, exploring how medieval people conceptualized the sacred and profane -- and then troubled the very binaries such a system established. Broadly interpreting the term “sex,” we will explore issues of sexual and romantic desire; sexual acts and behaviors; medieval versions of gender identity; pre-modern understandings of “biological” sex; love and courtship; and more. Readings will be mostly literary (both canonical and non-canonical) but will also include some excerpts from religious texts and both medieval and early modern medical treatises, including work from Geoffrey Chaucer, Alain de Lille, Christine de Pizan, St. Augustine, Margery Kempe, Thomas Mallory, John Gower, and Marie de France. We will pair these primary source texts with commentary and essays from critics such as Judith Butler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Mills, and Carolyn Dinshaw. While texts will be presented in their original form where possible, knowledge of Middle English is not a prerequisite for the course. Prerequisite: One 200-level English course or permission of instructor
ENGL B348 Medieval Childhoods (1 Unit)
This course examines childhood and adolescence in the Middle Ages, exploring both texts for children and those that portray childhood. We will consider adolescent sexuality, royal primogeniture, childhood education and apprenticeship, and theologies of infancy. Readings will include lullabies; early educational texts; nativity plays; chivalric training guides; poetry written by children; and instructional manuals for toys.
ENGL B356 Black Britain (1 Unit)
This course explores Black British literature from 1945 to the present, focusing on how the decolonization of the British Empire and pivotal moments of mass migration such as the 1948 arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush from Jamaica to London engendered a surge of Black artistic production following the second world war. We will investigate the categories of “Blackness” and “Britishness” in relation to their transnational and transracial implications, as well as their co-construction with categories of class, gender, and sexuality. Authors may include Sam Selvon, Buchi Emecheta, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and others. Prerequisite: One course in Department of Literatures in English
ENGL B357 A Star is Born: Race, Gender, and Celebrity (1 Unit)
This course will explore the concept of celebrity in cinema and cinematic culture from the standpoint of race and gender. Focusing on, but not limiting ourselves to, the classical Hollywood cinema (about the 1910s to the 1960s), we will approach the topic of stardom from theoretical and institutional perspectives. We will quickly discover that the study of celebrity opens out onto broad questions about the distinction between art and reality. What is the distinction, for instance, between a person and a character? What is it about celebrities that makes this question especially salient? What are we doing, precisely, when we identify with a character on screen, and, moreover, when that character is played by someone extremely famous? What are the racial, sexual, and gendered performances that go into the construction of celebrity? What political operations are at work in the formal construction of identification? Under what circumstances is identification something to be complicated, challenged, or avoided altogether? Celebrity also seems to hold within it the promise of its own demise. The extremely famous, for instance, are susceptible to infamy—or worse, irrelevance. How do race, gender, and sexuality intersect with fame’s fundamental fragility, the way that celebrity seems to court obsolescence? We will examine these and other questions by way of classical and contemporary stars such as Josephine Baker, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Anna May Wong, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga.
ENGL B358 Gertrude Stein: Difficult Genius (1 Unit)
As a radical modernist writer, theorist of language, and self-styled “genius,” Stein looms large in literary history. In this course, it is our task to read (and enjoy!) Stein’s difficult, genre-breaking writing. We will study Stein’s eclectic body of work, which spans the first half of the twentieth century (and two world wars, Stein’s move to Paris, a lesbian marriage, shifting ideas about gender and sexuality), against its cultural backdrop. Among the questions we will ask are: How does Stein’s work redefine reading? What are the politics of “radical” and “experimental” language use? What is a queer text? What is a genius?
ENGL B359 Dead Presidents (1 Unit)
Framed by the extravagant funerals of Presidents Washington and Lincoln, this course explores the cultural importance of the figure of the President and the Presidential body, and of the 19th-century preoccupations with death and mourning, in the U.S. cultural imaginary from the Revolutionary movement through the Civil War.
ENGL B364 Slum Fiction: From Dickens to The Wire (1 Unit)
David Simon’s acclaimed television show The Wire has repeatedly been related to the Victorian novel. This course links Victorian London and 20th-century Baltimore by studying: literary relations between Dickens and Poe; slum writing; the rise of the state institution; a genealogy of serial fiction from the nineteenth century novel to television drama.
ENGL B371 Contemporary Literature (1 Unit)
What is the contemporary? And when is it? Are the critically lauded works of the first two decades of the twenty-first century still “contemporary” to us? What does reading and accessing the “contemporary” tell us about our relationship to time, history, and identity? We’ll explore possible answers to all these questions by reading a diverse array of contemporary literature, covering many of the most popular and potent genres of the last twenty years, including autofiction, speculative and climate fiction, political poetry, romance, and historical fiction. We’ll also ground our readings with cutting edge literary criticism that considers not only the content of literature but its institutional and economic contexts, asking how literature has changed in an era of multinational publishing conglomerates, digital distribution, self-publishing, an expanding list of literary prizes, and the dominance of Amazon. We’ll read primary texts by Hanif Abdurraqib, Sally Rooney, Wendy Trevino, Colson Whitehead, and others. Students will engage in close analysis of specific novels, stories, and poems, perform research on contemporary literary trends, and participate in virtual visits with contemporary scholars. Prerequisite: One 200-level course or permission of instructor.
ENGL B372 Black Ecofeminism(s): Critical Approaches (1 Unit)
How have Black feminist authors and traditions theorized or represented the ecological world and their relationship to it? How does thinking intersectionally about gender(ing) and racialization expand or challenge conventional notions of “nature,” conservation, or environmental justice? In what ways does centering racial blackness critically reframe a host of practical and philosophical questions historically brought together under the sign “ecofeminism?” Combining history and theory, the humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary course will use the work of Black feminist writers (broadly defined) across a range of genres to approach and to trouble the major paradigms and problems of contemporary Euro-American ecofeminist thought. The course uses fiction and poetry by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen as a gateway to a range of critical work by Jennifer Morgan, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Mies, and Val Plumwood as it attempts to define and deconstruct what Chelsea Frazier calls “Black Feminist Ecological Thought.”
ENGL B374 African-American Childhoods (1 Unit)
This course explores the literatures of African-American childhood from the late nineteenth century until the present day. We will explore “classic” works of children’s literature by authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Walter Dean Myers, Virginia Hamilton, Jacqueline Woodson, James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, June Jordan, Angie Thomas and others— alongside artifacts from a range of other spheres such as textbooks, chapbooks, and the overall rise of a new child-centered periodical culture at the turn of the twentieth century. We will pay especial attention to the ways in which the intertwined categories of literacy and property have shaped racialized notions of childhood in the United States. In addition to close textual analysis, we will engage with major theoretical works in the field of childhood and identity studies, while also investigating firsthand what can be learned via the physical examination of children’s books held in Bryn Mawr’s Ellery Yale Wood Collection.
ENGL B380 Spenser and The Faerie Queene (1 Unit)
This class is a deep dive into the works of a single author: Edmund Spenser, a poet, courtier, and colonial administrator for Queen Elizabeth I. We will consider Spenser's prose and poetry in relation to questions of gender, race, and sexuality, as well as nation-building projects, imperial fantasies, and religious division. Centering on a slow read of "The Faerie Queene," the class will also address his sonnets, pastoral poems, and prose works.
ENGL B382 Speculative Futures, Alternative Worlds (1 Unit)
Just as colonization is an act of speculative fiction, imagining and violently imposing a different world, so too does decolonization rely on the power of imagination. This course will explore how Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Asian American cultural producers deploy speculative fiction to interrogate white supremacy and imperialism and to imagine decolonial futures. We will analyze representations of racism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, environmental destruction, and anti-immigrant discrimination in works by writers, filmmakers, and artists such as Octavia Butler, Sabrina Vourvoulias, N.K. Jemison, Ken Liu, Alex Rivera, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, as well as anthologies such as Walking the Clouds and Nets for Snaring the Sun. In doing so, we will probe the role that literature, film, and graphic narratives can play in decolonizing knowledge. Students will be also introduced to key theoretical concepts such as modernity/coloniality; ethnic futurisms (Afro-Futurism, Latinxfuturism, Indigenous Futurism, etc.); marvelous realism; survivance, and social death that will help them unpack the critical work accomplished by genre fiction and query the ways in which the aesthetic imagination can contribute to social justice.
ENGL B391 Literary Approaches to the Quran (1 Unit)
The Qur'an, the central holy scripture of Islam, has a long history of being studied as much for its literary and broadly aesthetic qualities as for its divine guidance. This course will engage in a sustained analysis of the history of the study of the Quran as literature, including the recitational practices associated with it, practices that have historically been considered antithetical to the project of modern literature, since they challenge the hegemony of literacy and written textuality. Students will also learn about the Quran and the Quranic interpretive tradition in relation to key fields within literary studies, such as postcolonial theory, African American studies, and American studies. In doing so, this course will also open up space to examine and interrogate the secular basis of the modern humanities. Readings will include work by Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Malcolm X, Edward Said, and others.
ENGL B397 Senior Essay Workshop (1 Unit)
This course will provide students working on their 399 senior essay with a weekly meeting for discussing and workshopping their essays as they unfold across the semester. Students will read one another's work and engage one another's primary and secondary sources. Students will be expected to read deeply in each other's fields and work closely with both workshop faculty and one another on the revision process.
ENGL B398 Senior Seminar (1 Unit)
Required preparation for ENGL 399 (Senior Essay). Through weekly seminar meetings and regular writing and research assignments, students will design a senior essay topic or topics of their choice, frame exciting and practical questions about it, and develop a writing plan for its execution. Students will leave the course with a departmentally approved senior essay prospectus, an annotated bibliography on their chosen area of inquiry, and 10 pages of writing towards their senior essay. Students must pass the course to enroll in ENGL 399.
ENGL B399 Senior Essay (1 Unit)
Supervised independent writing project required of all English majors. Students must successfully complete ENGL 398 (Senior Conference) and have their Senior Essay prospectus approved by the department before they enroll in ENGL 399.
ENGL B400 Senior Thesis (1 Unit)
Independent Senior Thesis. Prereq. ENGL B398
ENGL B403 Supervised Work (1 Unit)
Advanced students may pursue independent research projects. Permission of the instructor and major adviser is required.
AFST B210 Black History in American Cinema (1 Unit)
This course will serve as an overview of the history of Black Cinema and the portrayals of persons of African descent in cinema from the early 1900s to the present. This includes developments from Hollywood, independent filmmakers, and experimental foreign films. Additionally, and more importantly, we will venture to gain a deeper comprehension of the politics of film, as well as the ways that cinema has been used as a form of socialization, and/or self-expression.
ARTT B262 Playwriting I (1 Unit)
An introduction to playwriting through a combination of reading assignments, writing exercises, discussions about craft and ultimately the creation of a complete one-act play. Students will work to discover and develop their own unique voices as they learn the technical aspects of the craft of playwriting. Short writing assignments will complement each reading assignment. The final assignment will be to write an original one-act play.
ARTT B356 Theaters Of and After Samuel Beckett (1 Unit)
An exploration of Beckett’s theater work conducted through both reading and practical exercises in performance techniques. Points of special interest include the monologue form of the early novels and its translation into theater, Beckett’s influences (particularly silent film) and collaborations, and the relationship between the texts of the major dramatic works and the development of both modern and postmodern performance techniques.
COML B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities (1 Unit)
What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object-oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? By bringing together the study of major theoretical currents of the 20th century and the practice of analyzing literary works in the light of theory, this course aims at providing students with skills to use literary theory in their own scholarship. The selection of theoretical readings reflects the history of theory (psychoanalysis, structuralism, narratology), as well as the currents most relevant to the contemporary academic field: Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, Gender Studies, and Ecocriticism. They are paired with a diverse range of short stories across multiple language traditions (Poe, Kafka, Camus, Borges, Calvino, Morrison, Djebar, Murakami, Ngozi Adichie) that we discuss along with our study of theoretical texts. We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shape what we are reading. The class will be conducted in English, with an additional hour taught by the instructor of record in the target language for students wishing to take the course for language credit.
CRWT B159 Introduction to Creative Writing (1 Unit)
This course is for students who wish to experiment with three genres of creative writing: short fiction, poetry and drama, and techniques specific to each of them. Priority will be given to interested first- and second-year students; additional spaces will be made available to upper-year students with little or no experience in creative writing. Students will write or revise work every week; roughly four weeks each will be devoted to short fiction, poetry, and drama. There will be individual conferences with the instructor to discuss their progress and interests. Half of class time will be spent discussing student work and half will be spent discussing syllabus readings.
CRWT B165 The Writing Practice (0.5 Unit)
This course is designed for students who are pursuing—or contemplating—a major in Creative Writing. Throughout the semester, we will explore what it means to live a life rooted in writing: how to build a sustainable practice, how to navigate the rhythms of inspiration and discipline, and how to shape raw material into resonant work. Just as importantly, we’ll read and discuss published pieces that align with and challenge students’ own creative directions, helping to deepen individual projects-in-progress. At its heart, this course is about cultivating a creative community. We’ll share work, struggles, breakthroughs, and strategies, learning how to support one another as artists committed to growth. By semester’s end, students will be more grounded in their own voices and better equipped to take the next steps in their writing journey.
CRWT B233 Writing for Radio and Podcast (1 Unit)
In this course students will learn the foundations of journalism, audio storytelling, and radio/podcast production. We will break free of academic writing to find our authentic voices, and write for the ear. The course centers on two main projects: A short reported piece and a longer produced podcast episode. While the writing in and of itself is creative, this course will focus on of nonfiction writing as an audio medium. For half of the course meetings esteemed professionals from the current radio/podcast landscape will visit to share their career stories, teach us writing and production skills, and give us audio to analyze. Students will learn the basics of audio editing and produce their own pieces in Audacity or the software of their choice and workshop with classmates.
CRWT B260 Writing Short Fiction I (1 Unit)
An introduction to fiction writing, focusing on the short story. Students will consider fundamental elements of fiction and the relationship of narrative structure, style, and content, exploring these elements in their own work and in the assigned readings in order to develop an understanding of the range of possibilities open to the fiction writer. Weekly readings and writing exercises are designed to encourage students to explore the material and styles that most interest them, and to push their fiction to a new level of craft, so that over the semester their writing becomes clearer, more controlled, and more absorbing.
CRWT B261 Writing Poetry I (1 Unit)
In this course students will learn to "read like a writer," while grappling with the work of accomplished poets, and providing substantive commentary on peers' work. Through diverse readings, students will examine craft strategies at work in both formal and free verse poems, such as diction, metaphor, imagery, lineation, metrical patterns, irony, and syntax. The course will cover shaping forms (such as elegy and pastoral) as well as given forms, such as the sonnet, ghazal, villanelle, etc. Students will discuss strategies for conveying the literal meaning of a poem (e.g., through sensory description and clear, compelling language) and the concealed meaning of a text (e.g., through metaphor, imagery, meter, irony, and shifts in diction and syntax). By the end of the course, students will have generated new material, shaped and revised draft poems, and significantly grown as writers by experimenting with various aspects of craft.
CRWT B263 Writing Memoir I (1 Unit)
This course offers students a hands-on, reflective engagement with the art of memoir—the act of shaping lived experience into narrative form. We’ll explore how memory, language, and identity intersect as students write about the people, places, and pivotal moments that have shaped their lives. Through an open-ended inquiry into what we think we know—about ourselves and the world—and how we’ve come to know it, students will grapple with the slipperiness of truth and the complexity of self-representation. While the course does not center on the canonical tropes of American memoir—redemption, confession, captivity, and slavery—it remains critically attuned to their enduring influence. Throughout, we will challenge and reimagine the legacy of these narrative frameworks in order to make space for new voices and forms of life writing.
CRWT B264 News and Feature Writing (1 Unit)
Students in this class will learn how to develop, report, write, edit and revise a variety of news stories, beginning with the basics of reporting and writing the news and advancing to longer-form stories, including personality profiles, news features and trend stories, and concluding with point-of-view journalism (columns, criticism, reported essays). The course will focus heavily on work published in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. Several working journalists will participate as guest speakers to explain their craft. Students will write stories that will be posted on the class blog, the English House Gazette.
CRWT B265 Creative Nonfiction (1 Unit)
This course will explore the literary expressions of nonfiction writing by focusing on the skills, process and craft techniques necessary to the generation and revision of literary nonfiction. Using the information-gathering tools of a journalist, the analytical tools of an essayist and the technical tools of a fiction writer, students will produce pieces that will incorporate both factual information and first person experience. Readings will include a broad group of writers ranging from E.B. White to Anne Carson, George Orwell to David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion to James Baldwin, among many others.
CRWT B266 Screenwriting (1 Unit)
An introduction to screenwriting. Issues basic to the art of storytelling in film will be addressed and analyzed: character, dramatic structure, theme, setting, image, sound. The course focuses on the film adaptation; readings include novels, screenplays, and short stories. Films adapted from the readings will be screened. In the course of the semester, students will be expected to outline and complete the first act of an adapted screenplay of their own.
CRWT B268 Literary Editing (0.5 Unit)
This course will examine the tools that literary writers bring to factual reporting and how these tools enhance the stories they tell. Readings will include reportage, polemical writing and literary reviewing. The issues of point-of-view and subjectivity, the uses of irony, forms of persuasion, clarity of expression and logic of construction will be discussed. The importance of context—the role of the editor and the magazine, the expectations of the audience, censorship and self-censorship—will be considered.
CRWT B360 Writing Short Fiction II (1 Unit)
An exploration of approaches to writing short fiction designed to strengthen skills of experienced student writers as practitioners and critics. Requires writing at least five pages each week, workshopping student pieces, and reading texts ranging from realist stories to metafictional experiments and one-page stories to the short novella, to explore how writers can work within tight confines. Suggested Preparation: ARTW B260 or work demonstrating equivalent expertise in writing short fiction. Students without the ARTW B260, must submit a writing sample of 10-15 pages in length (prose fiction) to the Creative Writing Program during the preregistration period to be considered for this course.
CRWT B361 Writing Poetry II (1 Unit)
This course assumes that reading and writing are inextricably linked, and that the only way to write intelligent and interesting poetry is to read as much of it as possible. Writing assignments will be closely connected to syllabus reading, including an anthology prepared by the instructor, and may include working in forms such as ekphrastic poems (i.e. poems about works of visual art or sculpture), dramatic monologues, prose poems, translations, imitations and parodies. Suggested Preparation: ARTW B261 or work demonstrating equivalent familiarity with the basic forms of poetry in English. For students without ARTW B261, a writing sample of 5-7 poems must be submitted to the instructor to be considered for this course.
CRWT B362 Playwriting II (1 Unit)
This course challenges students of playwriting to further develop their unique voices and improve their technical skills in writing for the stage. We will examine how great playwrights captivate a live audience through their mastery of character, story and structure. Through a combination of weekly reading assignments, playwriting exercises, theater explorations, artist-driven feedback, and discussions of craft, this class will facilitate each student’s completion of an original, full-length play. Prerequisite: ARTW 262; or suitable experience in directing, acting or playwriting; or submission of a work sample of 10 pages of dialogue. All students must complete the Creative Writing preregistration questionnaire during preregistration to be considered for the course.
CRWT B364 Longer Fictional Forms (1 Unit)
An advanced workshop for students with a strong background in fiction writing who want to write longer works: the long short story, novella and novel. Students will write intensively, and complete a long story, novel or novella (or combination thereof) totaling up to 20,000 words. Students will examine the craft of their work and of published prose. Suggested Preparation: ARTW B260 or proof of interest and ability. For students without ARTW B260, students must submit a writing sample of 10-15 pages in length (prose fiction) to the Creative Writing Program during the preregistration period to be considered for this course.
CSTS B211 Dysfunctional Families, Gods from Machines: Intro to Greek Tragedy (1 Unit)
This course will introduce the student to the world of Greek Tragedy as it flourished in Athens in 5th century BC. We will read the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, & Euripides and discuss the playwrights' treatment of myth, the role of the chorus, the relation between text and performance, and the relevance of Greek tragedy for subsequent centuries, down to the present day. Special attention will be given to modern performances of these ancient plays in theater and in film as well as to the themes of choral voice, disability, euthanasia, slavery; the impact of war on women & children; and the relation between mortals and immortals. Please Note: NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANCIENT GREEK IS REQUIRED. ALL TEXTS WILL BE READ IN ENGLISH!
EALC B240 Topics in Chinese Film (1 Unit)
This is a topics course. Course content varies.
EALC B315 Spirits, Saints, Snakes, Swords: Women in East Asian Literature & Film (1 Unit)
This interdisciplinary course focuses on a critical survey of literary and visual texts by and about Chinese women. We will begin by focusing on the cultural norms that defined women's lives beginning in early China, and consider how those tropes are reflected and rejected over time and geographical borders (in Japan, Hong Kong and the United States). No prior knowledge of Chinese culture or language necessary.
HART B170 History of Narrative Cinema, 1945 to the present (1 Unit)
This course surveys the history of narrative film from 1945 to the present. We will analyze a chronological series of styles and national cinemas, including Classical Hollywood, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and other post-war movements and genres. Viewings of canonical films will be supplemented by more recent examples of global cinema. While historical in approach, this course emphasizes the theory and criticism of the sound film, and we will consider various methodological approaches to the aesthetic, socio-political, and psychological dimensions of cinema. Readings will provide historical context, and will introduce students to key concepts in film studies such as realism, formalism, spectatorship, the auteur theory, and genre studies. Fulfills the history requirement or the introductory course requirement for the Film Studies minor. This course was formerly numbered HART B299; students who previously completed HART B299 may not repeat this course.
HART B205 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Art, Death, and the Afterlife (1 Unit)
This course is writing intensive. This course aims to explore how art was used as a symbolic form to overcome death and to assure immortality in a variety of archaeological, philosophical, religious, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art. This course was formerly numbered HART B112; students who previously completed HART B112 may not repeat this course.
POLS B353 Politics and Fiction (1 Unit)
This course explores relations of politics and fiction from two directions and using two kinds of texts. The greater part of the course will be concerned with “political fiction” in a broad sense of that term: here we will explore some works of (mostly) contemporary literature and film that reflect on such themes as: authority, governance, bureaucracy, totalitarianism and pluralism, the relation of public and private, and the politics of truth and narrative. Secondly, drawing on non-fictional texts, we will take up some related questions of “fictional politics.” Here, our concerns will be with the role of political myth generally, but more specifically with the particular “fictionality” of contemporary politics. Authors may include Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Franz Kafka, Kenzaburo Oe, Jorge Luis Borges, Jane Campion, Akira Kurosawa, Joan Didion, and Hannah Arendt. Prerequisite: One lower-division course in Political Theory, Philosophy, English, or Comparative Literature, or consent of instructor.
RUSS B277 Nabokov in Translation (1 Unit)
A study of Vladimir Nabokov’s writings in various genres, focusing on his fiction and autobiographical works. The continuity between Nabokov’s Russian and English works is considered in the context of the Russian and Western literary traditions. All readings and lectures in English.