Upper-Level Course Descriptions

Professor Candace Barrington

This course will be unlike any other English course you have taken.

It is an intensive workshop in which you will learn (1) to analyze literature at the
sentence level, and (2) to be in control of the sentences you write.
It will be fun.

It assumes you are ready and eager to be an active learner. Be prepared to spend at
least two (but probably closer to three) hours studying for each class meeting. If you do
all the course asks, you can expect to be a better reader and writer of English sentences by the end of the term.

This course is open (without permission) to all English majors, Creative Writing minors, Cinema Studies minors, and Linguistics minors. Other majors will need instructor’s permission. The course cap of 20 students will be strictly held.

Professor Robert Dunne

American Romanticism delves into writings from the antebellum period, probably one of the most turbulent in this country's history.  Transcendentalism was at its heyday, amidst hotbed issues like slavery, women's rights, and immigration.  There will be close readings of a number of authors, including Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, Fanny Fern, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, and others.

Professor Jaclyn Geller

This course invites students to analyze what is probably the most overlooked, misunderstood period in British Literature: the long eighteenth century. Often seen as an era of stasis and equipoise – a dull placeholder between the more exciting Renaissance and Romantic eras – the long eighteenth century (1660 to 1832) is actually one of the most daring, startling, and generically experimental times in British literary history. It produces an unprecedented brand of acidic satire, the English-language novel as we know it, secular analysis of gender roles, and one of the most stringent critiques of marriage in western history. Participants in this class will meet criminals from the lowest to the highest echelons of society; odes to sex toys; miniscule islanders, giants, and talking horses. They will encounter separatist female communities, makeshift groups of traveling philosophers who wander amidst the Egyptian pyramids, fracases over locks of hair, and actual apocalypses of bad taste. Finally, class members will survey ruthless highway robbers, venal politicians, and operatives so mercenary they make the first two categories seem lovely: husband-hunters. 

The course covers (though by no means exhausts) numerous eighteenth-century genres: the lyric, the comic drama, the verse satire, the novel, the mock epic, and the essay. It combines lectures, discussion, and group work. There are two exams, a brief in-class presentation, and a final paper.

Professor Aimee Pozorski

This is a gateway undergraduate course and prerequisite for 400 level English courses that prepares students for upper-level study in the English major. Through the study of American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth—one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century—this course provides introduction to literary theory and various literary critical approaches. It is a “sandbox” in which students will gain practice in fundamentals of literary research while continuing to develop skills in literary analysis, close reading, and argumentation.  

Professor Burlin Barr

This course looks at the extraordinary changes in film culture in the United States during the time of the civil rights movement, the countercultures of the 60s, and the war in Viet Nam. Many of the films of this period actively re-imagine the cultural and political entity that goes by the name of "The United States" and the films offer many opportunities in which we can hear American culture talking to itself during this period. We will look at popular cinema as well as works by independent film-makers. The emphasis for the course will be on narrative cinema, although final projects are possible on non-fiction or documentary works. 

Professor Candace Barrington

This course will trace literatures produced in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas
between the 8th and 15th centuries, the Middle Ages between two eras of global
expansion. Our course reading list will be structured around some of the great travel
writings of the period: Marco Polo’s Travels, The Travels of Ibn Battutah, The Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels, and Columbus’ Diario. Alongside these travel writing, we will read some of the great literature a traveler could have encountered along these routes, such as Dante’s Inferno, The Thousand and One Nights, Wu Chengen’s Journey to the West, The Sundiata, and The Myth of Quetzalcóatl. Along the way, we will explore the famous libraries housing these works and examine the various writing systems in use at this time: manuscripts written in Roman and Arabic alphabets, rolls written in Chinese and Japanese characters, and even Incan quipu (or talking knots).

Professor Natalie Catasús

From the mid-twentieth century to today, people from the island countries of Cuba and Haiti have taken to the sea on small, sometimes handmade boats and rafts in hopes of escaping turbulent political and economic conditions at home. Their stories have been told in many forms of media ranging from photography and journalism to literature and the visual and performing arts. However, despite similarities across their journeys and conditions at home—and despite the fact that members of both groups have historically been held alongside one another in U.S. immigration detention centers—Cuban and Haitian migration have often been treated as discrete phenomena. This separation results partly from the legacy of colonization that has balkanized the region.

In this course, we will use a comparative, digital humanities-based approach to examine how Cuban and Haitian sea migrations have been imagined in literature and popular media. Just like in other English courses you may have taken, we will investigate how literature and visual media represent the human condition. We will do this through careful textual analysis of fictional, nonfictional, and poetic works by writers of Cuban and Haitian descent. At the same time, digital tools such as mapping and data visualization will help us consider humanistic questions from new angles as we turn to digital archives and consider how these migrations have been curated for public memory. Throughout the semester, we will experiment with digital humanities tools (no prior experience necessary), and we will explore the following questions: How have these migrations been imagined across different forms of media? How does putting literary and digital (or digitized) materials in conversation with one another affect how we interpret the events they aim to represent?

Professor Lakmali Jayasinghe

This course provides students the opportunity to engage with world literature from a variety of global cultures in understanding how gender and sexual identities are conceptualized, represented, and practiced in diverse countries from around the world. How do different global cultural understandings of gender and sexuality, particularly from the non-west, help us to explore what it means to be “queer”? In what ways have colonialism and imperialism led to the suppression and erasure of non-heteronormative gender and sexual identities that existed prior to colonialism? To what extent are our current understandings of gender and sexual identity a product of a normative neocolonial epistemology? These are some of the questions that this course will try to address by engaging with world literature that showcases a wide spectrum of global gender and sexual identities.