Department of English

ENGL H101  THEORIES OF THE NOVEL  (1.0 Credit)

Alexander Millen

Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts); B: Analysis of the Social World

This course introduces students to the genre of the novel in English with a focus on desire, loss, and literary form. In order to ask the questions, ‘Why and how do we read novels? What does this experience enable?” we will interrogate theories of the novel, its early formation and contemporary forms. We will also consider changing cultural representations of subjectivity, nation, race, gender, and ways of reading. How is the reader variously constructed as witness to (and participant in) desire and its demise? How do developments in narrative voice influence the idea of fiction as a didactic, pleasurable, speculative and/or imaginative space? What is the novel’s role in effecting social change across centuries and geographies? Open to majors and non-majors—no prerequisites. Limit: 20 students.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H111  INTRODUCTION TO POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE  (1.0 Credit)

Rajeswari Mohan

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

An introductory survey of English literature from regions that used to be part of the British Empire, focusing on topics such as the representation of first contact, the influence of western education and the English language, the effects of colonial violence, displacement, migration, and exile. Also considered will be the specific aesthetic strategies that have come to be associated with this body of literature.

ENGL H112  THEORIES OF THE REMIX  (1.0 Credit)

Lindsay Reckson

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course introduces students to the study of literature through the art of borrowing, sampling, recycling, and remixing. Approaching the remix as a creative/critical practice rather than a fixed genre, we’ll read texts that foreground modes of cultural theft, refuse originality and authenticity as such, and mobilize the remix as an important source of knowledge production.

ENGL H113  PLAYING IN THE DARK: FREEDOM, SLAVERY & THE HAUNTING OF US LITERATURE  (1.0 Credit)

Gustavus Stadler

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

According to Toni Morrison, the relentless valorization of freedom in a nation built upon the enslavement of people of African descent created a literature full of ghosts and other spectral presences. This course looks at how horror, the Gothic, and the supernatural structure U. S. narrative (mostly) fiction’s engagement with race and history, focusing on how literature disorients our understanding of the “real” when that supposed real conceals histories of violence, terror, revenge, and subversion.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H122  PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT  (1.0 Credit)

Stephen Finley

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

New 100-level course that will look carefully at what it is to be located in a particular place, environment, or cultural condition (both grounding and constraining), from which one is exiled, either from choice, necessity, or (violent) coercion. What is the end result of leaving or losing home upon the human person and the narrative of the displaced life that follows? Diverse readings from Gosse, Joyce, James, Levi, Baldwin, Eire, Harjo, Wilkerson, Gornick, and Lahiri. Pre-requisite(s): none

ENGL H201  CHAUCER: CANTERBURY TALES  (1.0 Credit)

Danielle Allor

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

Course devoted to close reading of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; secondary readings include critical approaches and brief excerpts from other medieval sources.

ENGL H212  THE BIBLE AND LITERATURE  (1.0 Credit)

Stephen Finley

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

A study of the Bible and its diverse genres, including legendary history, law, chronicle, psalm, love-song and dirge, prophecy, gospel, epistle, and eschatology. This study is accompanied by an extremely various collection of literary material, drawn from traditional and contemporary sources, and from several languages (including Hebrew), in order to illustrate the continued life of Biblical narrative and poetry.

ENGL H225  SHAKESPEARE: THE TRAGIC AND BEYOND  (1.0 Credit)

Kimberly Benston

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

An "introductory emphasis" study of the major tragedies and related histories, comedies, and romances, with special reference to the evolution of dramatic form, poetic style, characterization, and ideology as they are shaped by Shakespeare's persistent experimentation with dramas of extravagant will, desire, tyranny, skepticism, and death. Particular attention will be paid to key scenes in an effort to assess both Shakespeare's response to contemporary literary and cultural concerns and the internal reformation of his own craft. Prerequisite(s): First Year Writing

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H226  DISABILITY AND LITERATURE  (1.0 Credit)

Danielle Allor

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

How are bodies and minds depicted as "normal" or "abnormal"? This course will address how bodily differences and impairments are given social meaning as disability, and how these disabilities are portrayed in literary genres including scripture, hagiography, poetry, drama, novels, short stories, and memoir. We study these depictions from the perspective of disability studies, a discipline that seeks to understand the cultural meanings and material realities of disability with respect to systems of oppression. Pre-requisite(s): Completion of the Writing Requirement

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H230  POETICS OF ABOLITION  (1.0 Credit)

Lindsay Reckson

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course explores the role of poetry and other forms of creative expression in the history of prison abolition and related social justice movements. Focusing on incarcerated writers and artists who theorize life worlds in and beyond racial capitalism and the carceral state, the course approaches art-making as a practice of imagining abolitionist futures. Pre-requisite(s): First year writing seminar Lottery Preference: English majors and PJHR concentrators.

ENGL H232  THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: NARRATIVES IN LONG-FORM COMICS  (1.0 Credit)

Joshua Kopin

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course will explore narrative representation in the comics medium, particularly the way graphic narratives accommodate multiple literary genres such as fiction, fantasy, memoir, biography, and history. By examining the interplay between image and text in graphic novels, it will consider the aesthetics and politics of visual literacy and multi-modality in relation to representations of history, memory, cultural difference, mental illness, gender, sexuality, political struggle, and trauma.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H234  A QUEER AND TRANS MIDDLE AGES  (1.0 Credit)

Danielle Allor

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

What stories about queer and trans people circulated in the medieval period, and what does this body of literature tell us about the social construction of sexuality, gender, and embodiment? In this course, we will read medieval literature featuring lesbian, gay, transgender, and asexual characters alongside documents of historical queer and trans people and contemporary queer theory and trans studies scholarship. All texts will be read in modern English translation. Crosslisted: GSST.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H238  CREATIVE WRITING: NONFICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Thomas Devaney

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Creative Expression

In this workshop-centered class, students will learn to generate and revise works of prose nonfiction such as memoir, long-form reporting, intellectual essays and reviews.

ENGL H243  THE PLANETARY PREMODERN  (1.0 Credit)

Danielle Allor

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course will explore how poets, philosophers, and early scientists imagined the planet from antiquity to the early modern period. We will investigate medieval and early modern representations of the planet Earth, from descriptions of the natural world to representations of the planet in space. We will examine these works from the perspectives of the fields of literary studies, environmental humanities, animal and plant studies, and history of science. Pre-requisite(s): Completion of the Writing Requirement Lottery Preference: English and Environmental Studies majors

ENGL H245  PERFORMANCE, LITERATURE AND THE ARCHIVE  (1.0 Credit)

Lindsay Reckson

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

The ‘archive,’ as both an institutional and performance practice and a theoretical concept, has been one of the most studied sites in performance and literary studies. The hegemonic, patriarchal institution of the archive that constructs and perpetuates the canon and the master narratives of history while, marginalizing, silencing, and erasing the subaltern and the subcultural has been contested by the poststructuralist philosophers and critical theorists of the late 20 th and early 21 st century. A new concept of the archive transpired in the interdisciplinary fields of postcolonial, gender, cultural, and performance studies, one that is more utopian and more inclusive and is not limited by dominant repressive power structures and ideologies. This archive does not merely revisit the past to excavate the eradicated traces and silenced voices, but also, perhaps more importantly, opens the potential for a formerly unimaginable, and yet-to-be-imagined future.

ENGL H249  INTRODUCTION TO ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE  (1.0 Credit)

Elizabeth Kim

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts); B: Analysis of the Social World

This course will explore the diversity of Asian American experience by studying a selection of foundational and emerging works by Asian American writers. Assigned readings of various literary genres will address themes such as immigration, generational conflict, racism, assimilation, difference, and political struggle. Key lines of inquiry include: What does Asian American identity, culture, and aesthetic look like? How do writers represent them? What does the racial and literary category “Asian American” constitute? Crosslisted: ENGL. Pre-requisite(s): None

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H253  ENGLISH POETRY FROM TENNYSON TO ELIOT  (1.0 Credit)

Stephen Finley

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

A study of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Browning, Hopkins, Hardy, Owen, and Eliot, from "In Memoriam" (1850) to "Little Gidding" (1942). Poetry will be approached via the visual arts.

ENGL H254  ROMANTICISM AND THE NOVEL  (1.0 Credit)

Stephen Finley

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

The course begins with a sampling of Romantic poetry (Coleridge, Byron, Keats) and then proceeds to study Gothic fiction (Zastrozzi, Frankenstein), Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and the novels of Austen (Sense and Sensibility), the Brontes (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre), and Dickens (Oliver Twist).

ENGL H258  DESIRE AND DOMESTIC FICTION: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL IN THE 19TH C.  (1.0 Credit)

Debora Sherman

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course is designed as an introduction to the novel and to narrative theory in a trajectory loosely inscribed from the late 18th to the mid19th century, beginning with Richardson’s Pamela and culminating in George Eliot’s extraordinary and exemplary Middlemarch. These several novels propose both an epistemology—what we know—as well as an affective sensibility, or a structure of feeling, and we might question their purpose: to amuse, to entertain, certainly, but to educate, to compel, to convince us of a certain understanding of the world. As well, the course will look at the purchase of contemporary critical investments upon the act of reading itself or how reading is inflected through different models of critical and theoretical discourse: how narrative economies shape and determine the nature of our experience or what we can know of our experience; how narrative determines a subject "self" and how these selves are then transected by race, gender, class, and other social and political determinants; how narratives manage the less obvious and sublimated worlds of desire and the body's disruptions; how narratives negotiate the grotesque, the spectacular, and the sensational; and finally, how these variously constituted needs and desires become constructions of “textual knowledge”.

ENGL H260  TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: COMICS AND OTHER GRAPHIC NARRATIVE  (1.0 Credit)

Joshua Kopin

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

Enrollment Limit: 30

ENGL H265  AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: BLACK HORROR  (1.0 Credit)

Asali Solomon

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts); B: Analysis of the Social World

This course will explore the artistic genre of horror and its tendencies, with a particular focus on representations of Blackness in literature, film and television.

ENGL H267  GLOBAL SF SINCE 1945  (1.0 Credit)

Maud McInerney

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

SF—science fiction, speculative fiction—is the primary allegorical mode of the contemporary world and permits reflections upon and critiques of the world we inhabit today. This course explores the explosion of the genre in the decades since the WWII and the advent of atomic weapons. We will read classics of post-apocalyptic fiction from the ‘50s and ‘60s before turning to stories that engage queer identities, Afrofuturism and African Futurism, and the global threat of climate change. Crosslisted: ENGL. Pre-requisite(s): None Lottery Preference: Reserve 10 spaces for First Year Students

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H269  THE QUEER NOVEL BEFORE STONEWALL  (1.0 Credit)

Gustavus Stadler

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

An examination of non-normative sexualities and gender identifications as the guiding thematic and formal force in a series of U. S. novels.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H272  TOPICS IN IRISH LITERATURE: JOYCE/BECKETT  (1.0 Credit)

Debora Sherman

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

Looks at the work of these two major figures as epitomizing an Irish rhetoric in post-colonial reading which “enacts a movement that begins in aphasia and ends in eloquence” [Seamus Deane], in this case in a comprehensive reading of Joyce in the most prolix of texts, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and Beckett, where texts seemingly court in silence their own undoing.

ENGL H273  MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE: MIXING MEMORY AND DESIRE  (1.0 Credit)

Alexander Millen

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

An exploration of literary modernism in Britain through analysis of fiction, criticism, and aesthetic manifestos in their historical contexts. Possible authors include E. M. Forster, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf.

ENGL H274  MODERN IRISH LITERATURE  (1.0 Credit)

Debora Sherman

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

Irish literature from Swift to Seamus Heaney, with attention to language as a “fissured terrain” (Eagleton) that reflects the complex geographic violence, political history, and cultural conditions of an often-contested national literature, colonial and post-colonial.

ENGL H275  BRITISH IMMIGRANT WRITING  (1.0 Credit)

Alexander Millen

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

The starting premise of this course is that the English language and its literary traditions hybridize into rich and strange forms when thrown into contact with regional cultures, myths, and aesthetic practices in the many parts of the world that were once British colonies. This course will trace the English literary tradition in South Asia beginning with responses to the colonial encounter, moving on to the role played by literature during decolonization, and ending with the ways poetry, novels, and plays engage the challenges of nationalism and, more recently, globalization. Writers we read will include Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Rokeya Hossain, Michael Ondaatje, Lalithambika Antherjanam, Nessim Ezekiel, Kamila Shamsie, and Amitav Ghosh.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H282  AN ENERGY OF PROFUSION; AN ENERGY OF LINE : THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT, 1900-1920  (1.0 Credit)

Debora Sherman

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course considers modernism as a collective enterprise in the earlier part of the 20th century that took various forms in art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, psychology, photography, and film, an undertaking that perhaps reorganized the fundamental experience of time and space, or at least as these are experienced through the critical apertures of diverse arts. The purpose of the course is thus to establish an interdisciplinary narrative of modernism. The intention of the course, however, is not only to pursue what seems to be an historical modernism as an essentially European movement both cosmopolitan and international, but to identify what might be at stake aesthetically in diverse forms in diverse disciplines. To that end, we focus upon the idea of abstraction as a semiotic coding for the alienation of the aesthetic object from historical circumstance or the aestheticizing of diverse experience in the specialized experience of the aesthetic object. But we will also look at the historical sources for modernity at the turn of the century or what seems to anticipate modernity in the work of Ruskin, Pater and—critically—Wilde. We will want, as well, to look at the cultural crisis of the first World War that seemed to precipitate such a turn to abstraction. Thus the course continually interrogates and contests meaning construed as both abstract, ahistorical, and transtemporal—as modernism seemed to present itself—and meaning as always and ever historically embedded. Works studied in the course will be diverse: in addition to various literary works—notably Mallarmé and Joyce—we will also look at the work of Cezanne and the Cubists; architecture from Art Nouveau to the Bauhaus; the Futurist movement and the idea of the avant garde; Duchamp and Surrealism.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H291  CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY I  (1.0 Credit)

Elizabeth Kim

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Creative Expression

This is a creative writing workshop on poetry. Students will read and analyze a wide range of published poetry, write poems that respond to weekly prompts, and give feedback to classmates’ work. A final portfolio of revised poems is required. This course has an enrollment limit. Students must submit a writing sample of no more than 5 pages of poetry (if you have them) or any piece of writing (creative or academic) that you believe reflects your strongest work to ekim1@haverford.edu. Please include your name, year, and major (if declared). Students will be notified of their status in the course at the beginning of next semester.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H292  CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY II  (1.0 Credit)

Elizabeth Kim

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Creative Expression

This is an advanced poetry workshop. Students will have the opportunity to expand their repertoire and craft by modeling their writing on the work of various book-length works of published poetry. We will analyze and investigate aspects of form and content related to the composition of full-length poetry collections. A final portfolio of revised work is required. Prerequisite(s): Completion of poetry writing course and writing sample (no more than 5 pages of poetry). Submit writing sample to ekim1@haverford.edu.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H293  CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION I  (1.0 Credit)

Asali Solomon

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Creative Expression

This course is an introduction to the techniques and strategies of fiction writing, with particular emphasis on the short story. Weekly reading assignments will include both anthologized stories and student-generated ones. This course has an enrollment limit. You must submit a writing sample to asolomon@haverford.edu by the end of the preregistration period. Please send no more than 10pp – prose fiction if you have it or any piece that reflects your skill as a writer. Please include your name, year and major (if declared). You will hear about your status in the course at the beginning of next semester.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H294  CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION II  (1.0 Credit)

Asali Solomon

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Creative Expression

Students in the Advanced Fiction Workshop will not only continue to hone the basic elements of their fiction, including character development, dialogue, plot and prose style, but will focus much of their efforts on revision and the process of "finishing" a story. Prerequisite(s): One fiction writing course or instructor consent, and submission of writing sample to course professor

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H295  NEW MEDIA PERFORMANCE PROJECT  (1.0 Credit)

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Creative Expression

New Media Performance Project (NMPP) incorporates processes of devised and experimental theatre with the creative use of digital media technologies for the realization of an evening-length performance. In response to topical cultural issues, students will engage with a variety of audio-visual media and interactive systems through sessions of improvisation, theatre games, and other creative research. Acting experience is not required, but students should be comfortable with public speaking at a minimum.

ENGL H296  CREATIVE WRITING: PLAYWRITING I  (1.0 Credit)

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Creative Expression

This course will introduce the craft of playwriting by with an interdisciplinary exploration of performance, design, and theatre in the generating of new work for the theatre. Coursework includes weekly writing assignments towards completing new play drafts, reading playscripts and watching recorded performances that highlight elements of writing for the stage. Class sessions center the workshopping of written text both for short-term and committed play idea assignments, as well as thedissection of noteworthy contemporary plays. Pre-requisite(s): None Lottery Preference: Course roster will be set by professor using submission of writing samples.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H298  JUNIOR SEMINAR I  (1.0 Credit)

Kimberly Benston

Division: Humanities

Junior seminar comprises of a two part sequence that, through class readings, discussion, and writing tutorials, engage students in a study of (1) a series of texts representing the range and diversity of the historical tradition in British and American literature, and (2) critical theory and practice as it has been influenced by hermeneutics, feminism, psychology, semiology, sociology, and the study of cultural representation, and as it reflects the methods of literary criticism. Prerequisite(s): Only open to English majors

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H298J  JUNIOR SEMINAR I  (0.5 Credit)

Kimberly Benston

Division: Humanities

Junior seminar comprises of a two part sequence that, through class readings, discussion, and writing tutorials, engage students in a study of (1) a series of texts representing the range and diversity of the historical tradition in British and American literature, and (2) critical theory and practice as it has been influenced by hermeneutics, feminism, psychology, semiology, sociology, and the study of cultural representation, and as it reflects the methods of literary criticism.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H299  JUNIOR SEMINAR II  (1.0 Credit)

Lindsay Reckson

Division: Humanities

Part II of the sequence focuses on narrative and its theorization and criticism. Readings include George Eliot's Middlemarch, stories by Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe, and James Joyce's Ulysses.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H304  DREAMING THE MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPE  (1.0 Credit)

Danielle Allor

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts); B: Analysis of the Social World

This course enters the imagined landscapes of the medieval period through one of its most popular genres: the dream vision. We'll explore visions of strange forests, mystical gardens, glass temples, and jeweled cities; visions that offer potential for divine insight into the natural order of the universe but also possess surprising specificity in their plant, animal, and inanimate inhabitants. In addition to literary texts, we'll read selections from medieval natural philosophy and contemporary ecocritical theory. Lottery Preference: English majors by seniority

ENGL H305  THE PREMODERN LIFE OF TREES: INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND LITERARY STUDY OF THE PAST  (1.0 Credit)

Danielle Allor

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course seeks to examine premodern literary representations of the natural world alongside historical, scientific, and experiential ways of understanding the environment. Our case study will be the figure of the tree. In collaboration with the Haverford College Arboretum, we will study literature from the premodern world that depicts trees, forests, and gardens while cultivating botanical, artistic, and historical knowledge about the trees of Haverford. Pre-requisite(s): One English course or ENVS 101, 202, or 203 Lottery Preference: English majors

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H309  AGAINST DEATH: OPPOSING CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE  (1.0 Credit)

Lindsay Reckson

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts); B: Analysis of the Social World

Advanced inquiry into creative and critical responses to the death penalty in the United States from the 1830s to the 1970s. Our aim is to explore the relationship between art and social protest, and to examine how capital punishment has manifested U.S. histories of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality. Readings in primary historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and critical theory. Pre-requisite(s): Freshman writing, plus one 200-level ENG course; or freshman writing plus PEAC101 or PEAC201. Crosslisted: ENGL and PEAC

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H346  NEW(S) MEDIA,PRINT CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF PRINT  (1.0 Credit)

Laura McGrane

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course explores a century of critical response and creative media innovation (1670-1770) in relation to questions about form, materiality, circulation, authority, and embodiment across genres. What structures control systems of knowledge and creative production in eighteenth-century Britain and how do these help us think about current incarnations of readership and form today? Our most ambitious texts will be Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy—a meditation on experimental fiction, mortality, history, and digression; and Anne Carson's experimental poem Nox. The course is part of the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives initiative and will work closely with poet Anne Carson and Philadelphia theater group Lightning Rod Special. Some performance workshops and travel off campus will be required. Interdisciplinary students welcome. Crosslisted: English, Visual Studies Prerequisite(s): At least one 200-level ENGL course or instructor consent

ENGL H353  VICTORIAN POVERTY, ECOLOGY, AND PUBLIC HEALTH  (1.0 Credit)

Stephen Finley

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course will be centered upon the homeless and working poor of the 1840s and 1850s as they are described in the literature and social documents of the period. We focus on the relationship between human destitution and environmental degradation. The course, often simply, is about sewers (or lack thereof) and sewage—about water, contamination, and epidemic disease.

ENGL H358  HISTORY AND/IN FICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Alexander Millen

Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

A sustained inquiry into the political and aesthetic horizons of historical fiction, this advanced seminar studies British historical novels from the twenty- and twenty-first centuries. Exploring a wide array of imagined pasts—from early modern England to the First World War, among others—we will pay particular attention to how texts conjure and contest national myth-making. Alongside our close readings of individual texts we will consider the fate and fluctuating prestige of the historical novel more broadly.

ENGL H361  TOPICS IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN LIT: REPRESENTATIONS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY  (1.0 Credit)

Asali Solomon

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

For the past three centuries African American writers have mined the experience of chattel slavery in the cause of literal and artistic emancipation. Slave narratives, as well as poetry, essays and novels depicting slavery, constitute a literary universe so robust that the term subgenre does it injustice. In this work spanning the 18th-21st centuries, the reader will find pulse-quickening plots, gruesome horror, tender sentiment, heroism, degradation, sexual violation and redemption, as well as resonant meditations on language and literacy, racial identity, power, psychology, democracy, freedom and the human character. This course is focused primarily on prose representations of slavery in the Americas. Our discussions will incorporate history, but will foreground literary and cultural analysis.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H362  TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: WRITING ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE  (1.0 Credit)

Gustavus Stadler

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

A seminar on the literary portrait, examining mostly non-fiction by Anglo-American and African American writers from the late 19th century to the present. Topics include the erotics of portraiture, portraiture and the archive, portraiture and personal/historical trauma, collective portraiture, satire/critique, data portraits, modernist/post-modernist portraiture. We’ll frequently refer to visual forms of portraiture, including painting, photography, video art, and cinema. Regular writing assignments will include our own experiments in writing about others.

ENGL H365  TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: ROCK, SOUL, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM  (1.0 Credit)

Gustavus Stadler

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts); B: Analysis of the Social World

This seminar will examine the emergence of music writing in the 60s and 70s in the context of contemporaneous struggles in the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Students will also develop their own writing on the politics of pop as a cultural form. Prerequisite(s): Two 200-level English courses or the equivalent

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H366  TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: ASIAN AMERICAN HYBRIDITY  (1.0 Credit)

Elizabeth Kim

Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H371  SOUND STUDIES: MODERNITY AND SYNTHESIS  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

The 20th century marks a time of rapid transformation in Anglo-American ideas about sound, music, listening, and communication. Technologies that electronically store, transmit, and generate sonic information have caused a fundamental shift in how and why we listen. In this course we will immerse ourselves in the technologies and ideas that continue to shape our ongoing relationship with the auditory and each other. Students will compose new works for electronic hardware systems while investigating related topics in sound and critical listening. We will learn the basics of modular synthesis and gain inspiration from some of the foremost thinkers on the subject of the auditory. No prior experience with music-making is necessary, but students should be prepared to perform and show work on a regular basis. Prerequisite(s): Two 200-level English courses or instructor consent

ENGL H376  LITERATURE AND POLITICS OF SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID  (1.0 Credit)

Laura McGrane

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

This course explores the history and historiography of South African apartheid from its inception in 1948 to its democratic overthrow in 1994. We will consider the interplay between complex definitions of race, gender, nation and difference in novels, plays, and poetry written during the apartheid years. We will also discuss the tension between an ethics and aesthetics of literary production in a time of political oppression. What would it mean for one to write an apolitical text in a cultural space rife with racial and social tensions? Authors will include Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton, J.M.Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Alex La Guma. Crosslisted with Africana Studies.

ENGL H377  PROBLEMS IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE: IMPERIAL INTIMACIES  (1.0 Credit)

Alexander Millen

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts); B: Analysis of the Social World

This course mobilizes the concept of “imperial intimacies” to theorize the rich historical, imaginative, and political horizons of imperialism. Taking our cue from Hazel Carby’s book of the same name—and from what Lisa Lowe has influentially described as The Intimacies of Four Continents—this interdisciplinary class will study literary works (novels, memoir, poetry, film) that bring into critical focus the lasting contradictions and critical challenges of colonial and postcolonial literature and culture. Crosslisted: English, Comparative Literature Prerequisite(s): Two 200-level English courses or instructor consent

(Offered: Fall 2024)

ENGL H399B  SENIOR CONFERENCE  (1.0 Credit)

Asali Solomon, Elizabeth Kim, Gustavus Stadler, Kimberly Benston, Laura McGrane, Lindsay Reckson, Maud McInerney

Division: Humanities

Students work closely with a faculty consultant over the course of their senior year in the research and writing of a 25-30 page essay or a piece of creative writing accompanied by a critical preface (for the creative writing concentration). The course culminates in an hour-long oral examination that covers the thesis and coursework done for the major. Prerequisite(s): Limited to senior English majors only

(Offered: Spring 2025)

ENGL H399F  SENIOR CONFERENCE  (0.5 Credit)

Asali Solomon, Elizabeth Kim, Gustavus Stadler, Kimberly Benston, Lindsay Reckson, Maud McInerney

Division: Humanities

Senior Thesis work with advisor. Prerequisite(s): Limited to senior English majors

(Offered: Fall 2024)