ELIT 1101 First-Year Seminar: The Literary Life

This class approaches literature from many angles: the creative to the scholarly, the personal to the ethical, the edifying to the entertaining. At the heart of our study will be a survey of literary values such as invention, emotion, style, subversion, beauty, humor-those fundamental reasons readers come to literature in the first place. Through readings and discussion, we will consider the great variety of ways literature expresses these values, and will explore them ourselves via creative assignments. Along the way, we will learn about literary life today through discussions with nationally renowned writers who will visit the class, and through units on literary scholarship, book reviewing, and magazine and book publishing. In the midst of it all, you will write and workshop your own stories, poems, and non-fiction works. Course enrollment preference is given to first-year students.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 1102 First Year Literature Seminar

This course explores the transformational effects of estrangement by pairing modern English literary and popular musical figures famous for their roles in reflecting and effecting radical social shifts. Questions of performance, alienation, mass culture, and fame will thread through five units: Godot and Glam: Beckett / Bowie; Portrait and Punk: Joyce / The Clash; Aestheticism and Alternative: Wilde / Morrissey; Gender and GenX: Woolf / Lady Gaga; Romance and Rap: Keats / Kendrick. Students will then construct their own pairing for a class presentation and final essay. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 1103 First Year Literature Seminar

Literature has traditionally been a welcoming space for people who, by choice or history, do not fit easily in the mainstream of community life. The widespread changes and upheavals of the last century have vastly expanded the ranks of such people, accelerating the processes of immigration and exile while fundamentally altering traditional notions of home and belonging. This course will examine fiction by writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Albert Camus, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and Teju Cole, who write from and about the position of outsider, exploring what such texts have to say about living in an unsettled, diasporic modern world - a world in which real belonging seems an increasingly elusive goal. In reading these texts, we will investigate how their authors have portrayed the journeys, hopes, and hardships of dislocation and alienation, as well as the role literature might play in creating a sense of community for immigrants, refugees, and people living in various forms of exile.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 1104 First Year Literature Seminar

Reading courses, each limited to 15 students. Topics: selected writers, varieties of approaches to literature, e.g., Southern fiction, the modern American short story, the mystery; consult Course Listings. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 1105 First Year Literature Seminar

Literature has traditionally been a welcoming space for people who, by choice or history, do not fit easily in the mainstream of community life. The widespread changes and upheavals of the last century have vastly expanded the ranks of such people, accelerating the processes of immigration and exile while fundamentally altering traditional notions of home and belonging. This course will examine fiction by writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Albert Camus, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and Teju Cole, who write from and about the position of outsider, exploring what such texts have to say about living in an unsettled, diasporic modern world - a world in which real belonging seems an increasingly elusive goal. In reading these texts, we will investigate how their authors have portrayed the journeys, hopes, and hardships of dislocation and alienation, as well as the role literature might play in creating a sense of community for immigrants, refugees, and people living in various forms of exile. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 1106 First Year Literature Seminar

Reading courses, each limited to 15 students. Topics: selected writers, varieties of approaches to literature, e.g., Southern fiction, the modern American short story, the mystery; consult Course Listings. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 1107 First Year Literature Seminar

Reading courses, each limited to 15 students. Topics: selected writers, varieties of approaches to literature, e.g., Southern fiction, the modern American short story, the mystery; consult Course Listings. Prerequisite: first-year standing.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 1400 Introduction to Writing About Literature

This is a discussion based course focused on analytical reading skills and the principles of effective writing. Through weekly writing assignments and revision, students learn the importance of critical thinking and questioning that are required for the development of ideas and good, clear writing.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Summer

ELIT 1996 English Literature Elective: 1000-Level

This course is used for transcribing 1000-level ELIT elective units.

Credit 3 units. EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

ELIT 2151 Literature in English: Early Texts and Contexts

How did what we now call English literature emerge? How did such literary activity reflect the world, and how did the world shape this writing? How can literature help us understand the history of art, race, religious identity and sectarian conflict, nations and empires, gender, sexuality, and class? We will address these questions by studying the early history of literature in English, from the Middle Ages through the late 18th century, as well as the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of contemporary literary studies. We will learn about the material forms of English literature (manuscript, print, and performance traditions) as well as major poetry and prose forms (e.g., sonnet, epic, blank verse, romance, letter, slave narrative). In addition to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Ignatius Sancho or Olaudah Equiano, the syllabus may include authors and texts such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Julian of Norwich, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Eliza Haywood. Note: This course satisfies one of the two 200-level requirements for the English major.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 2152 Literature in English: Modern Texts and Contexts

What is modern English literature, and how do we tell its story? Is it a succession of literary movements from romanticism to realism to modernism and beyond? Is it a canon of classic texts to survey? Is it a sustained critique of that canon's exclusions, a recentering of the marginalized authors whose works reveal previously obscured accounts of modernity? It is, in fact, all of the above. In this course, we will introduce students to the central themes, forms, and forces that have shaped the history of English-language literature from the late 18th century to the present, as well as to the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of contemporary literary studies. Throughout, we will examine the norms and assumptions of literary history, including those based in race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Students will encounter fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction from Britain and the United States, along with African, Caribbean, or other global literatures in English. Authors studied may include William Wordsworth, Phillis Wheatley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, James Baldwin, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zadie Smith. Note: This course satisfies one of the two 200-level requirements for the English major.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 2201 Sophomore Seminar

Topic will vary by semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 2210 Topics: Children's Literature

Topics changes each semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 2211 Topics: Banned Books: From the Giver to Lord of the Flies

Topics in literature, will vary by semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Summer

ELIT 2301 Publishing: History and Contexts

This course offers a broad introduction to book publishing, with the goal of establishing an understanding the larger issues facing publishing today, as well as the historical and cultural contexts that informs these issues. We will look at both multiple types of book publishing, with a general emphasis on contemporary Anglophone trade publishing, and will have frequent class visits (via Zoom) by professionals from different sectors of the publishing community. This course will count for one of the core requirements of the forthcoming Publishing Concentration.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 2996 English Literature Elective: 2000-Level

This course is used for transcribing 2000-level ELIT elective units.

Credit 3 units. EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

ELIT 2999 Research Assistantship

For students assisting English faculty members with their research. The student must provide a description of his or her assistantship and secure permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies. At the end of the semester, the student must submit a four-page essay describing the work done during the assistantship, along with any documents or work produced. In addition, a written evaluation by the faculty member they assisted is required. Up to three units acceptable toward the English Major. Only for declared English Majors. Must be taken pass/fail.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3000 Introduction to Literary Theory

This course introduces students to some of the most influential theoretical approaches to interpretation applied to English-language literature; to significant conceptual and historical debates about literary and cultural theory; and to the keywords used in these debates. Students will learn how to write and speak about theoretical texts and how to recognize the theoretical assumptions that underlie acts of literary interpretation. Theoretical approaches to be featured may include formalism; Marxism; psychoanalysis; gender and sexuality studies; structuralism and post-structuralism; postcolonial studies; critical race studies; new historicism and cultural materialism; cultural studies; affect theory; neurocognitive approaches; and disability studies. This course fulfills the literary theory requirement for the English major; no substitutions will be permitted. In order to preserve necessary seats for English majors, the course will be enrolled through the wait list.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: HUM

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3033 Children's Publishing: History, Context & Craft

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3100 The Great American Novel

What is the Great American Novel? This is a question that has been hotly debated for decades, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner to Toni Morrison. It's a question with a hundred answers and no answers at all-a question of taste, of prejudice, of time. But what is a "Great American Novel"? What does it look like? What do we expect of it? What have Americans throughout history wanted it to say about America? These are questions we can, and will, answer in this course. As elusive a thing as the Great American Novel has been, the idea of the Great American Novel has a long and fascinating history that mirrors all the major movements of American literature from the American Renaissance to the present. Piecing together the story of this dream, this cultural quest with all of its inclusions and exclusions, is a way of telling a shadow history of American society. The Great American Novel tradition is something like a fossil record of America's shifting norms in relation to race, gender, sexuality, domesticity, democracy, citizenship, immigration, labor, capitalism, and war. And so each presumptive Great American Novel is a new variation in an evolving genre and a new thesis statement of American grandiosity or guilt. By cataloguing shared themes, conventions, and preoccupations, and by paying close attention to a handful of likely-and unlikely-candidates, this course will ask big questions about American exceptionalism, American tragedy, and the role of art in American culture. Authors will likely include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Carmen Boullosa, among others. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3101 Literature and Consent

Western literature begins with a war fought over the raptus (abduction) of a woman, the theft of Helen by the Trojan prince Paris.  It's no secret that the violent abduction and sexual assault of women plays a constant-sometimes central, sometimes incidental-role in myth, history, fictional narrative, and poetry from the ancient Greeks to today. This class will consider the omnipresence of sexual violence in English literary history (and its antecedents) and ask why it is there, what its effects are, and how it shapes the way we think about gender, violence, freedom, and desire. This course contends that literature and literary history are keys to understanding the relationship between culture and sexual violence, and, conversely, that attention to sexual violence is key to understanding literary history. Students will acquire a broad historical understanding of consent as it evolved in literary, legal, and philosophical discourses to become a concept that organizes sexual and political freedom. We will ask: Is consent the best framework through which to mediate sexual harm? Are there alternative ways to imagine sexual encounters? How do various media manage sexual experiences? From the medieval romance to the eighteenth-century pornographic novel, from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" to "The Handmaid's Tale," this course will interrogate how literary explorations of consent provoke theories of subjectivity, desire, and power.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

ELIT 3102 Old English Literature: Beowulf

Beowulf is the earliest and one of the best vernacular works of western literature.  In this course, we will learn enough of the Old English language to read much of the poem in the original, relying on translations to bridge the gaps.  Student led discussion of scholarly articles will supply historical and  literary contexts for the poem.  Our emphasis will be on understanding, interpretation, and criticism of the poem.  Satisfies pre-1700 requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3103 Old English Literature: Introduction to Old English Language and Literature

Some of Europe's earliest and best vernacular literature is written in Old English, a language so different from the English of today that even the best modern translations cannot capture the character and power of original works. Because of its relation to modern English, however, enough of the language can be learned within weeks to begin reading Old English texts. In this course students will master the elements of Old English language, and learn enough to read and enjoy some of the greatest poetry in Old English, including Beowulf, and the culture that produced it. We shall compare the originals with modern translations by great poets such as Heaney and Pound. We shall also look forward to changes in the English language after the Norman conquest. Limited enrollment. Students should be ready for intensive language work in the first few weeks of the course. Satisfies the Medieval requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3104 The Writing of the Indian Subcontinent

The Indian Sub-continent has in recent years yielded a number of writers, expatriate of otherwise, whose works articulate the postcolonial experience in the foreign English tongue. This course is designed to be an introductory survey of such writing, drawing on select Sub-continental writers. Covering both fiction and non-fiction by several authors including R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Sara Suleri, Micheal Ondaatjie and Romesh Gunesekera, we will discuss such issues as the nature of the colonial legacy, the status of the English language, problems of translation (linguistic and cultural), the politics of religion, the expatriate identity and the constraints of gender roles.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3105 Caribbean Literature in English

Rum! Fun! Beaches! Sun! This is the image of the Caribbean in America today. This course will survey literature and culture from these islands, looking both at and beyond this tourists' paradise. It will aim to introduce students to the region's unmistakably vibrant tradition of multicultural mixture, while keeping an eye on the long history of slavery and rebellion out of which the islands' contemporary situation formed. Along the way we will encounter a wide variety of texts, from the earliest writing focused on life in urban slums, to the first novel ever to have a Rastafarian as its hero, to more contemporary considerations of the region's uncertain place in a U.S.-dominated world. Toward the end of the course, we will also look at important films like The Harder They Come as well as discussing the most globally famous cultural product of the contemporary Caribbean: reggae music. The course will involve readings from multiple genres, and will cover authors such as C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, and Caryl Phillips.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3106 Topics in Asian American Literature: Identity and Self-Image

Topics in Asian American literature which will vary from semester to semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3107 Topics in English & American Literature:Contemporary Literature of the East West Divide

Topics: themes, formal problems, literary genres, special subjects (e.g., the American West, science and literature, the modern short story). Consult Course Listings for offerings in any given semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H UColl: CD

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3109 The Medieval Romance

The romance grows out of the epic: how we get from the fall of Troy to the fall of Troilus. Readings from Vergil's Aeneid to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3110 Topics in Literature: Heroes and Lovers

We will read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, The Mabinogion, The Tain, Margery Kempe, and Malory's Morte d'Arthur.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3111 Topics In Literature

Called the Age of Revolution, the Romantic Age of British literature, 1770-1830, witnessed the birth of new lyric forms, the effacement of traditional strictures on style and taste, and produced through poetic voice (and its quaverings and multiplications) what might be called, over simply, the modern subject. Within a developing discourse of human rights and personal freedom, this growing assertion through poetry of individual expressivity allowed William Blake to construct in a single work a visual and verbal Jerusalem. It encouraged William Wordsworth to write a pathbreaking investigation of the sources of his own creativity that challenged conventional restraints on what topics can, and cannot, be confessed in poetry. Beginning with these two poets, we will consider the historical contexts, and the sometimes competing histories of ideas, that shaped the five major British Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and John Keats. We will follow an anthology for much of the poetry, including the poems and prose of influential contemporaries (female as well as male) who included the political philosopher Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. Texts also to be assigned will include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Byron's Don Juan.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3112 Topics in English and American Literature

Topics vary from semester to semester.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3113 Topics In Literature

This course explores the transformational effects of estrangement by pairing modern English literary and popular musical figures famous for their roles in reflecting and effecting radical social shifts. Questions of aestheticism, performance, audience response, fame, and influence will thread through five units. Godot and Glam: Beckett / Bowie Portrait and Punk: Joyce / The Clash Aestheticism and Alternative: Wilde / Morrissey Gender and GenX: Woolf / Lady Gaga Romance and Rap: Keats / Kendrick Students will then construct their own pairing for a class presentation and final essay. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3114 Topics in Literature

Topics: themes, formal problems, literary genres, special subjects (e.g., the American West, American autobiographical writing). Consult Course Listings for offerings in any given semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3115 Topics in American Literature: Travel Writing and Empire

There are two main strands in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century science fiction, which exist in tension: Escape from Earth (together with whatever you can salvage) and Return to Earth (with a new perspective, an alternate sense of how things actually work). Lower-case "sf" is a grab-bag category which includes pretty much all modern science fiction; all-cap "SF" is a more recently formulated category which tends to involve some form of Return to Earth. We will read an assortment of classic science fiction texts as well as several brief theoretical accounts of SF, always keeping the Escape from/Return to Earth dichotomy in mind and the particular significance it assumes in the Age of Covid and the Climate Crisis. What we now call science fiction was formerly termed scientific romance or speculative fiction - do these categories remain useful? Readings include diverse works by Hinton, Zamyatin, Stapledon, Le Guin, Delany, Butler, Gibson, and Brin. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3116 Topics In Literature

Islands have always lured the human imagination. They are places of longing, of splendid isolation--places where you can discover new forms of life and give up old ones. This course will explore the island as a place and as a state of mind. We will get to know loners and dreamers, travelers and survivors. We begin our journey with island stories from Homer's Odyssey and Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, stop over at Robinson Crusoe Island, and visit Jonathan Swift's Houyhnhnm-land, where we'll meet the man who wanted to be a horse. We'll finish our journey in the twentieth century. Along the way, we will get to know the different genres that have given islands literary form, from satire and novel to utopia and dystopia. Satisfies the Eighteenth-Century requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3117 Topics in American Literature

This course surveys the classics of nineteenth-century gothic fiction. We will approach the gothic as a realm of writing preoccupied with the monstrous and the foreign--and witness how these dark and exotic forces could become domesticated in novels that depicted what Henry James called "those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors." At times dismissed as superficial, formulaic and merely entertaining, the gothic texts under scrutiny here will also get credit for addressing profound and controversial questions about human nature and the nature of desire. Authors will include Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker. Satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3118 Topics In Literature

What does it mean to be a woman writer in a today's global literary community? What issues are women thinking, talking, and writing about now? How do women writers explore contemporary events? Do they share meaningful connections and contribute to a gender-specific literary tradition, or is "women's writing" simply a marketing category in the vein of "chick lit"? While we will consider recent novels, memoirs, essays, short stories, and poetry in light of specific socio-historical developments, we will also ask how these authors shape new political futures through their imaginative and critical works. By reading a diverse spectrum of writers from around the world, we'll assess the limitations and possibilities of the writing so often relegated to what novelist Meg Wolitzer has called "the second shelf." Authors studied may include Charlie Jane Anders, Alison Bechdel, Anne Boyer, Stephanie Burt, Leila Chatti, Danielle Dutton, Bernardine Evaristo, Elena Ferrante, Aracelis Girmay,  Lauren Groff, Saidiya Hartman, N.K. Jemison, Ada Limón, Patricia Lockwood, Layli Long Soldier, Valeria Luiselli, Ling Ma, Helen Macdonald, Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, Warsaw Shire, Zadie Smith, Kai Cheng Thom, and Shola von Rheinhold. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement for the English major; non-majors welcome.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3119 Contemporary American Women Poets

An introduction to the work of contemporary American poets who are women; extensive reading of both poetry and prose. Readings include the work of poets such as Bishop, Rich, Plath, Sexton, Clampitt, Gluck, Moss, Graham, Howe, Dove, Oliver, Forche, Lauterbach.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3120 American Literature to 1865

A survey of significant writers, works, and intellectual developments from the early Puritan settlements to the late 19th century. Our goal is the construction of a serviceable narrative of the nation's cultural and literary history. Readings include selections of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose by Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Satisfies both the 1700-1900 and the American requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3124 Selected American Writers

Intensive study of one or more American writers. Consult Course Listings for offerings in any given semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3125 Selected Writers: Jane Austen

In this class we will read all of Austen´s novels - "Northanger Abbey," "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park," "Emma," and "Persuasion" - as well as selections from her juvenilia and minor works, including the uncharacteristically wicked "Lady Susan" and the epistolary burlesque Love and Friendship. Since Austen was one of the earliest women writers to achieve both popular acclaim and canonical status, we will look closely at the evolution of her literary reputation. Was she a "lady novelist" who knew her place and limited her material accordingly? Or was she an uncompromising critic of her society who punctured its pretensions with her satirical pen? Of special interest in our investigations will be: family feuds and domestic relationships; gender and social roles; imitation and parody; sentimentalism and radicalism; Austen and the romance novel; Austen´s humor. We will also view an Austen film adaptation. Satisfies the Eighteenth Century requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3126 Selected American Writers: Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison has emerged as one of the most influential writers and critics in contemporary American culture. This course will examine her diverse literary and critical work from a variety of perspectives. Special attention will be paid to Morrison's contributions to African American literature and theory, in particular how she conceives of Black art and the responsibilities of its practitioners. In our study of her novels, we will explore such issues as the importance of history and myth in the creation of personal identity, constructions of race and gender, the dynamic nature of love, the role of the community in social life, and the pressures related to the development of adolescent girls. We will also examine the changing nature of Morrison's reception by critics and academics, and consider how and why she has achieved such widespread acclaim and influence. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3127 Selected American Writers

"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?" (Thoreau). In place of a wide sampling the course will focus on a few selected authors, most of them contemporary or near-contemporary, and explore the fictive worlds their writings bring forth. We will read texts closely, but we will also step back from them and consider how a writer's fiction creates a universe of character types, a network of interpersonal dynamics, a structure of values, and a vision of life; we will try to look at the world through a succession of others' eyes. Authors will likely include five or six of the following: Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Alice Munro, Milan Kundera, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Ann Beattie.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 3128 Tragedy

Much of our attention in this course will focus on the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and on determining what is unique to each playwright and what is common to the ancient Greek sensibility -- especially in terms of morality.  We will then look at selected tragedies of the twentieth century (those of O'Neill, Dove, and others), plays whose strategy has been to revisit particular Greek tragedies and recast them in the contemporary period.  What aspects of Greek morality remain constant over time and across differences of culture?  In what ways and to what degree are the parameters for morality always -- necessarily -- in shift?  These are among the questions we will attempt to answer in the course of our investigations into tragedy from its beginnings up to the present day.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3129 Reading in the Renaissance: Texts and Practices

This course aims, first, to acquaint students with English Renaissance literature, from Shakespeare to Dryden; then to investigate the ways in which that literature might have been read by its original audience; and finally to consider how such knowledge might, or should influence, our own understanding and experience of Renaissance texts.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3130 A History of the Golden Age of Children's Literature

A comprehensive survey of the major works for children written during this period.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3131 Modern Drama 1850-1920

The emergence of modern drama: emphasis on Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3132 Modern Drama 1880-1945

Major figures of modern drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov, Lorca, Synge, Pirandello, Brecht and O'Neill. Close literary study and consideration of these plays as examples of the art of the stage. Reference will also be made to contemporary experiments in the other arts, and to major literary movements in the time period under consideration.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3133 Modern Drama, 1945 to the Present

Course concentrates on the development of modern drama from 1945 to the present. Focus is on both literary and theatrical techniques as well as the examination of trends in the contemporary theatre from Samuel Beckett through Sam Shepard. Perspective is comparative and international in scope, with particular attention given to women and minority playwrights.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3134 Modern Drama

The establishment of modern drama: emphasis on Brecht, Giraudoux, Pirandello, Osborne, Williams, Miller. A look at major literary and theatrical movements shaping contemporary drama.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 3135 Topics in 19th- and 20th-Century American Writing: American Short Fiction

This course is directed toward a broad range of majors and non-majors with a serious but not scholarly interest in American Short Fiction.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3136 Topics in 20th-Century American Writing

An introduction to major American works and writers from the later 19th century through the mid-20th century. Writers studied include Twain, James, Crane, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Frost, Eliot and Stevens. The course assumes no previous acquaintance with the material and is directed toward a broad range of majors and non-majors with a serious but not scholarly interest in the subject. Students with little or no background in literature might be advised to take E Lit 213C (Chief American Writers), while English majors looking to do advanced work should consider the 400-level American literature sequence. Students who have taken E Lit 213C should not enroll in this course.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3137 Two Cultures: Literature and Science

The relation between biology and literature as it has been examined and expressed in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of the past two centuries.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3138 Introduction to Postcolonial Literature

At its zenith, the British Empire encompassed almost a quarter of the globe, allowing the diminutive island nation unprecedented economic, military, and political influence upon the rest of the world. This course will introduce some of the foundational responses to this dominance, both literary and theoretical, by the colonized and their descendants. We will examine important critiques of colonialism by theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, as well as literary works that reflect a postcolonial critique by authors such as V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Doris Lessing, and N'gugi wa Thiong'o. The course will interrogate how literature could be said to help consolidate Empire as well as ways in which it might function as rebellion against imperial power, with a view toward teasing out the problematics of race, gender, language, nationalism, and identity that postcolonial texts so urgently confront. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3139 Topics in Literature:

Topics course which varies by semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3140 Topics in Literature:

Cleopatra, queen of the Nile, has become famous for her romantic liaisons, political maneuvering, and her death by snake bite. Yet Cleopatra was also a formidable military strategist, a powerful leader who studied medicine and spoke nearly a dozen languages. Most importantly, Cleopatra was the prototype for depicting strong women on the throne. This course will explore how Early Modern playwrights re-imagined Cleopatra in the Renaissance, a time which saw another strong queen, Elizabeth I, rise to power. We will pay special attention how these dramatists used Cleopatra to engage with issues of race, globalization, gender, history, and politics. Finally, we will think about how Shakespeare and his contemporaries analogized the exotic and sometimes scandalous Cleopatra with the virginal Queen Elizabeth, two women who mobilized the power of performance in order to assert female authority in their male-dominated societies. Readings may include works by Cicero, Lucan, Plutarch, and Virgil from antiquity; and plays by Marlowe, Mary Sidney, Daniel, Brandon, Elizabeth Cary, Fletcher, Dryden, and Shakespeare as well as the writings of Queen Elizabeth from the Renaissance. 3 short responses; midterm and final papers; and a presentation introducing one of the assigned readings. First-year and/or students with no prior knowledge of this topic are encouraged to enroll. Satisfies the Early Modern requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3141 Topics in Literature

Popular discourses celebrate globalization as a contemporary phenomenon characterized by increased connectivity, access, and diversity. Yet, the proliferation of borders-geographical, legal, and symbolic-radically troubles these idealistic accounts of inclusivity and progress. This course grapples with a range of global Anglophone literatures to explore the dark underside of globalization, minding the unevenness and violences of its histories and structures. Particularly, we will work through a set of literary and theoretical texts to investigate the role of literature and literary criticism in reproducing, complicating, and transforming the very conditions of the "global." Following the routes and historical legacies of colonialism and postcoloniality that structure the modern world, our participation in larger academic conversations will be guided by the following inquiries: How do literary and cultural productions not only reflect, but also produce and uphold the very contours of globalization? How do the proliferation of borders, histories of colonialism, and structures of violence trouble celebratory visions of an increasingly interconnected world? How can we perform readings that attend to a literary text's relationship to power dynamics and the world? The course will draw on writings from such artists and scholars as Aimé Césaire, Michelle Cliff, J. M. Coetzee, Franz Fanon, and Jhumpa Lahiri. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3142 Blacks and Jews in America

What do U.S. writers who identify as Jewish and/or African American have in common with each other? As some of you undoubtedly know, there has been much ink spilt on the correspondences and conflicts between these influential American groups. With an eye towards understanding their common ground-the move from ghetto to gated community, as it were (and, for some, the inability to do so)-we will look also to comprehend the fault lines that shape their literary identities. Too, we will see how other categories-of class, of gender, of immigrant status-further mark their productions. Readers of modern American literature should know the shared and vexed history of their literary worlds. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3143 Selected English & American Writers

This course will cover English and American writers.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3144 Topics in Literary Criticism and Theory

This course will juxtapose a wide variety of critical approaches to literary texts to current research in the digital humanities and statistical natural language processing to ask how we can think about the complexity of literary texts in computational terms. The computational turn in literary studies emphasizes scale and a broad perspective often described as "distant reading" and implicitly contrasts this to the kind of "close reading" that has traditionally been the focus of literary scholars. However, in spite the obvious benefits of scale, such approaches tend to focus on features that are completely internal to texts or to the corpus. In this course, we will explore how we can represent ambiguities of words, nuances of structure, the interaction of motifs, and the intensely intertextual way in which most literary research problems are formulated? While we will discuss the limitations and potentials of various computational approaches, we will focus more on the possible futures of computationally assisted literary criticism than a practical survey of various tools and techniques. No prior experience with statistics or computing is required.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3145 Topics: Literary Criticism and Theory: Ways of Approaching a Literary Text

What are some of the different ways of approaching a literary text?  How do you choose among them?  In this course we will begin by reading two important works from different genres (for instance, a novel such as Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' and a mid-length poem, perhaps "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" by William Stevens) together with a selection of critical essays about these works and their historical context.  The bulk of the course will then consist of readings among various theoretical approaches to literature, including deconstructionist, new historicist, cultural, hermeneutic, psychoanalytic, and feminist approaches, which we will then apply to the texts at hand.  The course is designed as a practical introduction to literary theory.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 3146 The Art of the Novel

This course will take as its starting point traditional models of the novel and will then examine a variety of novels from different traditions - American, British, continental - which in differing ways play against this type, bending, challenging or ignoring the rules. We will be interested in attempting to understand the logic of such idiosyncratic forms, both why each writer is attempting to defy or undo our understanding of a normative reality and of the usual novelistic proprieties and how each novel provides its own manner of coherence.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3147 The Art of Poetry

Techniques of poetry, considered theoretically and practically in relation to problems of form and significance: meter, rhyme, image, metaphor, stanzaic patterns, and others.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3148 20th-Century Poetry

This class sets course through 21st century poetry written and translated into English, focusing entirely on how poets write across cultures. Certain topics will seem particularly modern: ecopoetics, #BlackLivesMatter, and social media. Other topics will raise important and enduring questions: How do poets influence other poets? How do poems speak to oneanother? What can poetry learn from other arts? And what is a poem anyways? This course will introduce students to the practice of reading and writing about contemporary works of poetry in order to gain a keen understanding of how our own social, political, and cultural locations influence our readings of texts, and how diverse voices and experiences resonate cross-culturally. We'll discuss the boundaries and borders of poetry, what it means to think of poetry as a representation of our society and of our world, and how poetry reflects and speaks to our current political, economic, and social realities. We will also analyze the forms and modes that define contemporary poetry, and how these forms and modes are changed and adapted by poets of different races, genders, sexualities, nationalities, backgrounds, lineages and traditions. In the first half of the semester, we will work on a small-scale version of the primary prose genre of contemporary poetry criticism-the book review. In the second half of the semester, our writing will culminate in a final paper dealing with poetry and various aspects of globalization. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3149 Black Literature: Race, Class, and Writing in the United States and the Caribbean, 1900-1950

Study of the differences in literary tradition arising from the divergent social, racial, and educational milieux of the United States and the West Indies.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, HUM

ELIT 3150 The Writings of Philip Roth

Fiction by Philip Roth in chronological order from his earliest to his last major effort.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 3152 The Bible as Literature

The Bible is one book among many; the Bible is a book like no other; the Bible is not one book but many. The course will debate such positions and the different histories and practices of reading they involve. We shall read extensively in English translations of the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, with emphasis on literary form and ideas. We shall look at the Bible's material forms, and the history of its interpretation and translation. The aim is not to adjudicate its meaning but to explore what over time it has been taken to mean, attempting to locate within the book the potential for different interpretations. The course requires, and should foster, attentive reading, vigorous yet courteous argument, and respect for the readings of others.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3153 The Women of Greek Tragedy

This course examines the role of women in Athenian drama. Students will read English translations of the works of the three major tragedians -- Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides -- and their near contemporary, the comedian Aristophanes. Direct engagement with ancient texts will encourage students to develop their own interpretations of and written responses to the political, social, and ethical manipulation that these mythological women were compelled to endure and the subtle ways in which they appear to exercise power themselves. Selected scholarly articles and book chapters will help students to contextualize these ancient dramas in their culture of origin. Because such issues continue to preoccupy both sexes today, students will see how Greek tragedy addresses perennial historical and cultural concerns through the examination of adaptations of Greek tragedies ranging from Seneca in ancient Rome to Spike Lee's Chi-Raq and Luis Alfaro's Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles. The final research paper will encourage students to consider how a specific female character from antiquity is transformed for a modern dramatic audience.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3154 The Renaissance

Major texts of the European Renaissance examined to set English literary achievement in a continental context. Among authors to be studied: Petrarch, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, Luther, Wyatt, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Milton. Prerequisite: 6 units of literature, junior standing, or permission of instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: ENE

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3155 Topics in Renaissance Literature

Topics course in Renaissance Literature

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3156 Writing and the Representation of Pain

Writing intensive course on the representation of pain at every level, from private suffering to public policy. Course reader consists of examples of or extracts from a diversity of materials: the Bible and Ovid, medieval religious lyric, saints' lives, visions of hell and damnation, descriptions of visionary illness, Freud's Anna O, Kafka's In the Penal Colony, Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose, Woolf's On Being Ill, Artaud and the theater of cruelty; autobiographical and other writings by Susan Sontag and Inga Clendinnen; theory by Bataille, Deleuze, Dollimore, and Elizabeth Grosz; work on pain by Leder, Morris, Rey and others; poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Gwen Harwood, Alan Jenkins and others. We will also read Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain and two recent novels: Andrew Miller's Ingenious Pain and Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3157 The Victorian Period

This course begins with two classic mid-century novels-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens-once celebrated as intimate portrayals of a first person narrator meant to be representative of a new national type: the post-Romantic English subject rewarded by hard work and delayed gratification. We'll explore why some critics in the late 20th century began to emphasize how these once paradigmatic English stories were in fact fictions of empire, complicated portraits of an era when Englishness was inevitably defined by events and experiences that were geographically and culturally estranged from the British Isles. The remainder of the course will focus on authors of the late 19th century grappling with imperialism, colonization, globalization and the transformative technologies that gave birth to our modern world. Satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3158 Banned Books

Why would anyone want to burn a book? Under what circumstances would you support censorship? Several years ago a Russian student was exiled to Siberia for possessing a copy of Emerson's Essays; today, schoolboards in the United States regularly call for the removal of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye from classrooms and library shelves. Actions like these dramatize the complex interconnections of literature and society, and they raise questions about what we read and the way we read. The course explores these issues by looking closely at several American and translated European texts that have been challenged on moral, socio-political or religious grounds to determine what some readers have found so threatening about these works. Possible authors: Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Defoe, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Twain, Chopin, Brecht, Salinger, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury. Brief daily writing assignments.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM

ELIT 3159 African-American Literature: Early Writers to the Harlem Renaissance

This class/directed reading group will focus on approximately the first century of African American publications-of autobiographies and novels, manifestos and newspaper editorials. Although many works by early Black writers are now available in print-Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs spring instantly to mind-many more can be accessed through digital archives. We will survey a core group of printed texts, augmenting our readings via digital entities such as the Colored Conventions: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life, Common-Place's Just Teach One: Early African American Print and the Digital Collections of the Schomburg Division of the New York Public Library. Assignments will include essays and/or digital/online projects. Some classes may meet in the library or the Digital Humanities Workshop.  This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3160 African-American Literature: African-American Writers Since the Harlem Renaissance

African-American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries grows from the Harlem Renaissance into a world-shaping institution. Guggenheim, Pulitzer, and Nobel prize winners; card-carrying Communists, rock-ribbed Republicans, and Black Power nationalists; Broadway playwrights, Book-of-the-Month Club novelists, and even a U.S. President are among the many whose fictions and memoirs we will study, with special attention given to the intimate links between Black writing and Black music. The syllabus will thus feature authors ranging from poet Alice Dunbar Nelson (born 1875) to satirist Colson Whitehead (born 1969), with more than a dozen stops in between. Written assignments may include two papers and two exams. No prerequisites, but related courses such as E Lit 215 and/or AFAS 208 are suggested. Satisfies the American literature requirement in English and/or one 300-level elective requirement in AFAS.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3161 African Literature in English

The West has imagined Africa in fanciful but simplifying ways for centuries. This course will, instead, approach Africa as a complex site of modernity characterized by a kaleidoscopic blend of racial, ethnic, religious, political, and socioeconomic identities that defy easy summary or description. We will do this through a survey of the continent's formidable and dynamic tradition of literature written in English. The course will trace the development of African literature, from its roots in the oral tradition, to its response to colonial oppression, through its articulation of an autonomous identity on the road to political independence, and on to its contemporary status as a crucial, innovative powerhouse in the global literary marketplace. The course readings will include imaginative texts by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Dinaw Mengestu, as well as secondary readings on the political, cultural, and theoretical contexts within which African literature took shape.  Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3162 Shakespeare in Performance

This course is an introduction to Shakespeare's plays and poems through the interpretive framework of performance. A thespian himself, Shakespeare drew on his stage experience when writing his plays, collaborating with a theater company and shaping his characters to reflect the talents of its actors. Reading the plays as literature, we will study the evolution of how they have been produced on stage from their early modern premieres to the present day, comparing and contrasting different strategies for generating meaning in performance with reference to various film adaptations. By reciting a sonnet of their choosing and rehearsing a scene from one of the plays, students will gain new insight into performance as an interpretive act and a deeper understanding of the production and reception histories of Shakespeare's plays. Most importantly, we will consider why Shakespeare's works have continued not only to resonate, but also to entertain, for over 400 years. Assignments include: two papers; an in-class performance of a sonnet; and a group presentation of a scene from one of Shakespeare's playsaccompanied by a brief reflection statement. First-year and/or students with no prior knowledge of this topic are encouraged to enroll. Satisfies the Early Modern requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3163 Shakespeare

Introductory course emphasizing critical interpretation. Representative plays are studied in detail. Required of all English majors and minors.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3164 Adaptations Literature / Film / TV

The book was better than the movie. The movie wasn't faithful to the book. The TV series didn't capture the book like the movie did. These have forever been the complaints of readers watching their favorite works of literature adapted to the screen, and, in a media ecosystem increasingly flooded with adaptations and reboots of existing intellectual property, these complaints won't be going away any time soon. Film and literature have been interconnected since the very first films screened at end of the nineteenth century, but the dynamic between literature and media has sometimes been strained: film reviled as the cheap degradation of a vital art form, the novel anxious at the rise of narrative film - and later television - as rival storytelling media. But, viewing literature and visual media in opposition can obscure what becomes visible if we view them together. This is a course about the history, theory, and practice of adaptation from literature to film and television and back again rooted in both canonical and non-canonical case studies. We will study authors whose works have been repeatedly adapted across eras and media; filmmakers whose works are pastiches of various literary and cinematic sources; rigorously, obsessively faithful adaptations; radically transformative unfaithful adaptations; and works of literature and media that are themselves about the process and ethics of adaptation. The course will be anchored by a reading of Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel Station Eleven and a serial viewing - replicating the unusual original release - of HBO Max's miniseries adaptation.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3165 Topics in 19th-Century American Writing

The exultant but conflicted period that followed the success of the American Revolution initiated themes and began to weave cultural strands still familiar in the 21st century:  American heroes and scoundrels; the role of women in public life;  Christianity vs. Islam;  the psychology of moralism and delusion;  race as caste and subversive voice.   Course readings will include Franklin's Autobiography and the autobiography of Henry Tufts, a confidence man;
Parson Weems' cherry tree biography of Washington; Tyler's  The Algerine Captive (novel) and Susanna Foster's  Slaves in Algiers (drama);  other fiction and drama by Hannah Foster (The Coquette), Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland), Royall Tyler (The Contrast) and William Dunlap (Andre) - in which Washington weeps while ordering a spy's hanging; narratives by enslaved Africans Briton Hammon and John Marrant; the narrative of Samson Occam, a Mohegan; selections from "The Gleaner,"  Judith Sargent Murray.  Satisfies 1700-1900 requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3172 The Eighteenth Century

This course will cover literature from the eighteenth century.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 3404 Literature and Medicine

Because illness, disease, pain, and fear of death are essential features of the human condition, these themes frequently appear in major literary works, a survey of which we will read in this class. We will focus especially on the suffering, helplessness, insight, and enlightenment experienced by both the ill and those who care for them. Works responding to the devastating plagues in the medieval and early modern periods hold especial interest for those studying illness and medicine; we will read works on plague by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Defoe, with Sontag's Illness as Metaphor providing a starting point for our analysis. Two twentieth-century novels-The Plague, by Camus, and Blindness, by José Saramago-will show us the additional imaginative possibilities of plague as metaphor and allegory. We will also read shorter works of fiction by Tolstoy, Mann, Chekhov, Eliot, Gilman, and Porter, as well as Edson's play W;t. Students will be encouraged to consider how illness, disease, and fear of death affect both individual human beings and entire societies. Prerequisite: Writing 1.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

ELIT 3501 Topics In Literature

Starting with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, a book that helped re-ignite the Culture Wars, this course will consider the debates and problems that pervaded American culture during the 1990s. From the end of the Cold War to the sexual scandals that rocked Bill Clinton's presidency, from the emergence of the Internet to the rise of grunge and rap, the 1990s were a time of vast change in American culture. It was period when we, as a nation, reconsidered the legacy of the 1960s, the Reagan revolution, and the end of the Cold War, a time of economic expansion and cultural tension. In our consideration of this period, we will take a multidisciplinary approach when tackling a variety of materials-ranging from literary fiction (Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections) and popular films (Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and The Cohen brothers' The Big Lebowski) to the music of Nirvana and Public Enemy-in an attempt to come to a better understanding of our recent history. Throughout the semester, we will pursue the vexed cultural, political, and historical questions that Americans faced in the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and consider how literary texts imagined this period of American history.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3502 Topics in American Literature: Girls' Fiction

Topic varies. Writing intensive.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: ENL

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3503 Topics in English and American Literature

Selected Topics. Varies from semester to semester. Writing Intensive

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3504 Literature and Medicine

Because illness, physical and mental suffering, and fear of death can have such powerful and disturbing effects, literary works depicting them offer unique insights into human experience. In this class we will read a selection of literary works that depict the suffering caused by diseases like cancer, tuberculosis, asthma, and plague; explore the symbolic and allegorical meanings that have come to be associated with them; and consider the roles and responsibilities of physicians charged with treating patients with these conditions. Readings will be drawn from such writers as Sontag, William Carlos Williams, Defoe, Dickens, Poe, and George Eliot. We will read modern English translations of works by such writers as Boccaccio, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Mann, Proust, and Camus. In this writing-intensive course, students will develop their skill in literary analysis, and will be urged to establish their own voices as writers and thinkers. Students will be enrolled from the waitlist; preference will be given to Medical Humanities minors, English majors and minors, and seniors.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3510 Writing Modern War

The twentieth century, as Graham Greene observed, was a century in which there would never be a peace. This writing intensive course examines the ways in which modern writers have tried to describe warfare and its impact on both combatants and those on the home front.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 3512 Bots, Drones, and Cyborgs: Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines

We llive in a world where not only our access to information, but our social interactions, and bodily autonomy are increasingly mediated by- surveilled, analyzed, facilitated, enhanced- by technology. This course will ask what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines. What happens to our notions of individuality, autonomy, and political subjecthood when domains or categories once thought exclusively to be the preserve of humanity- language, emotion, complex information processing (playing chess, or driving cars, for example)- are increasingly threatened, replicated, and extended by technology? We will cover a range of science fiction texts including Karel Capek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and William Gibson's Neuromancer along with works of speculative fiction such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun along with films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix. We'll juxtapose these cultural representations of artificial intelligence with emerging philosophical and scientific discussions to ask to what extent the fundamental ways AI continues to redefine the boundaries of the human as a category.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3513 The Literature of the American Revolution

While not a historical survey, the course will present several case studies raising questions about later myth and contemporary reportage.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3514 Selected English and American Writers

This course is intended as an in-depth introduction to, arguably, the two most significant American fiction writers of the first half of the twentieth century. We will focus primarily on each author in his own right, beginning in each case with some short stories and then moving to exemplary novels by each. However, we will also consider their shared thematic concerns: the construction of identity; memory and mortality; sexuality and gender - and the contrasting techniques and forms through which each represented these issues. (Writing Intensive).  Satisfies the American (old major) or Twentieth Century (new major) requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3515 The American Novel: Split and Hybrid American Identities

Examination of the struggle to form an enabling identity for author, characters, and text against the divisive pressures of family and society.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: BA, HUM EN: H

ELIT 3516 Writing About Performance

In this writing-intensive course, students will develop critical strategies for writing about theatre and other performance events, in the present and in a range of historical periods.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 3517 Memory and Narrative: The Literature of Memory

Writing intensive course that examines the role of memory in drama and fiction.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3518 On Time: Clocks, Calendars, Crisis in Modern British Fiction

This course focuses on the cultural understanding and literary representation of time in the first half of the twentieth century. Our authors include Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, C.I. James, Mulk Raj Anand, and a number of other canonical and non-canonical writers. In their novels, novellas, and short fiction, these writers take account of a profound change in the metrics and meanings of time. Following the establishment of Standard or Greenwich Mean Time at the end of the nineteenth century, the experience of time shifted from a "natural" (daily, seasonal, annual) to an "artificial' (numerical, standard, global) measure. This new standard time, also known as "rational" or "public" time, moved at once stimulated interesting, significant, and lasting responses in the arts of literature, the novel and short fiction especially, that moved in time. What we know as "the stream of consciousness," for instance, witnesses a new emphasis on "private" internal time as a reaction to rational, public time. We will follow this evolving sense of time into and through some of the cataclysmic, not so "rational" events in real historical time: two World Wars (both undergone and anticipated), the rising and spreading crises of Empire, a global financial meltdown, and the near-revolutions achieved by the women's and workers' movements. Here the understanding of the meaning and shape of history and the direction of historical time is richly conflicted, and the literature of the period takes the measure of this duress. Our reading will include work from the British Isles as well as colonial (soon to be postcolonial) locations. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement in the English Major and the university's Advanced Writing requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3519 Epistolary Literature in the 18th Century: Other Peoples' Letters

In this writing intensive course, we will examine the attraction the letter held for authors and readers alike, taking into consideration the advantages and the disadvantages of the form, its role in the development of the early novel, and current theories of epistolary writing.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 3539 Jews, Jersey, and America: Philip Roth Reconsidered

Beginning with the publication of his debut Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, Philip Roth remained a highly visible, and at times highly controversial presence on the American literary scene. Questions of Jewish American identity; the power struggle between fathers and sons; the irrationality of male sexual desire; the consequences of exercising one's (artistic, sexual, personal) freedom; the tumultuous history of Newark; the nature of the American experiment-these are the central concerns that percolate throughout his thirty-one books. In this course, we will read Roth's major novels and explore how his fiction addressed these questions. Moreover, we will discuss how we can approach Roth's fiction in the wake of such events as the Trump presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the #Me Too Movement. How do we read Roth in the wake of the political and social traumas that have shaped our recent history? How does Roth's fiction speak to the recent rise in anti-Semitism? To help inform these questions, we will also consider how contemporary writers, such as Nicole Krauss and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, have directly reconsidered Roth's legacy in their fiction, rethinking his treatment on such topics as Jewish-American identity, sexual politics, and the status of the novel.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3690 Reading Sex in Premodern England

This course introduces students to the literary representation of gender and sexuality in England from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. To understand a tradition that addressed the intractable problem of human sexuality in terms very different from ours, we will ask: how does pre-modern culture imagine gendered identities, sexual difference, and erotic desire? How do various contexts-medical, religious, social, private, public-inform the literary representation of gender and sexuality? What are the anatomies and economies of the body, the circuits of physical pleasure, and the disciplines of the self that characterize human sexuality? Students will have the opportunity to study romances, saints' lives, mystical writings, diaries, plays, sex guides, novels, and scientific treatises. By learning how to read sex in pre-modern literature, students will acquire a broad cultural and historical understanding of English sexualities before the descent of modern sensibilities.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 3891 Senior Research Seminar I

This course is tailored to the needs of students who are pursuing honors in English in their senior year. It will develop students' ability to gauge how different approaches affect the research and the outcome of a project in literary studies. It will guide them in their research by analyzing and discussing research design, the construction of an archive, and the assessment and use of sources. Assignments will include annotated bibliographies, summaries of the critical debate on student topics, abstract writing, research presentations, as well as drafts and final versions of chapters or essays. We will workshop many of these assignments in the classroom and practice peer review. The seminar will stretch over two semesters, ending before spring break, when honors work is due in the college. It is required for students who pursue honors by coursework and by thesis.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 3892 Senior Research Seminar II

This course is tailored to the needs of students who are pursuing honors in English in their senior year. It will develop students' ability to gauge how different approaches affect the research and the outcome of a project in literary studies. It will guide them in their research by analyzing and discussing research design, the construction of an archive, and the assessment and use of sources. Assignments will include annotated bibliographies, summaries of the critical debate on student topics, abstract writing, research presentations, as well as drafts and final versions of chapters or essays. We will workshop many of these assignments in the classroom and practice peer review. The seminar will stretch over two semesters, ending before spring break, when honors work is due in the college. It is required for students who pursue honors by coursework and by thesis.

Credit 2 units.

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 3999 Independent Study

This course is for independent study in English Literature.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4100 Old English Literature

Close study of some major literary texts (e.g.. Beowulf, the Exeter book) and major issues (e.g., Anglo-Saxon and Latin culture, traditions of heroic literature) of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Prerequisite: E Lit 407, or permission of instructor.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4101 Medieval English Literature I

Can an abundance of "melancholy humor" cause one to dream of black bears? Can dreams foretell the future? This course will encounter such questions in the popular medieval genre of the dream vision. Medieval writers used the dream to frame explorations of love, grief, history, writing, religious experience, political critique, apocalypse, and prophecy. We will encounter dreams about animals and dreams had by animals, men in love with flowers, flowers transformed into queens, and pilgrims seeking truth. As we make our way through the works of writers including Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and Christine de Pizan, we will also read about dreams in the Bible and in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and will investigate theorists of dreams from Macrobius to Freud. We will gamble, slightly revising Freud, that the interpretation of dream visions is the "royal road" to the understanding of medieval literature. Satisfies the Medieval requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 4102 Medieval English Literature II:Medieval Womens Writing

Topics course in Medieval English literature.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4103 Sixteenth-Century English Literature

A study of literary culture as inflected by the material conditions of production, distribution, and consumption of the early book.  Taking seriously Francis Bacon's claim that printing was one of the three material constituents of early Modernity, we will devote attention to the relation of manuscript and print, the social effects of the printing of the Bible and devotional literature, and the influence of print on literary form and on the nature of authorship. We will consider the effects of monopolistic practices within the book trade, and probe a set of complementary relations: between print and cultural nationalism, text and image, printed script and live performance, and coterie and mass consumption. Most of the texts and authors under examination will be central to the traditional English and continental literary canon, but we'll pepper them with nontraditional questions. This course satisfies the Early Modern historical requirement. This course counts towards the Publishing Concentration.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 4104 17th-Century English Literature: 1603-1660

Selected readings in English literature from Donne and Jonson through Dryden.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 4105 Restoration & Augustan Literature: 1660-1740

Our subject in this course is the relation between literature and biography in early modern England.  We will read examples of early modern biography -- Aubrey's BRIEF LIVES, Walton's lives of Herbert and Donne, Burnet's life of Rochester, Clarendon's biographical sketches in THE HISTORY OF THE REBELLION - but we will also be concerned with the ways in which constructions of the life of a writer can be made from their own work, and from a variety of contemporary materials including letters, diaries, gossip, and slander.  In addition to Aubrey, Walton, Burnet, and Clarendon, we will read Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Rochester, and Dryden.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4106 18th-Century English Literature

Selected readings in English literature from Pope and Swift through the age of Johnson.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 4107 Readings in 19th-Century English Literature

Primarily reading the works of two novelists - Eliot and Trollope - and two poets - Tennyson and Browning - we will look at how literary culture sought to challenge, reform, and convey religious authority.  Beginning with an overview of the ideas of three theorists of an irreligious modernity - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - we will then focus on the creative writing of our major authors.  Some attention will fall upon the prophets of religious decline and problems of belief; more often we will observe how writers and readers became essential agents in the experiment of constructing communities where the expression and toleration of religious dissent became an ideal.  Likewise, we will mostly stop our ears to the manifestoes of theologians in favor of listening to redeeming conversations and arguments about liberty and duty, pleasure and pain, life and death.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4108 English Literature of the Romantic Period

This course will focus on the most important writing of the  Age of Romanticism in England, Scotland, and Ireland.  An era that emerged from the Enlightenment, it was galvanized by the French Revolution and its repurcussions in Ireland and elsewhere, and ended (long before the death of Wordsworth) with the victory of a conservatism epitomized by the leading theorist of beauty and the sublime, the Anglo-Irish  Edmund Burke.   Along with such topics as the Romantic sublime (and the uncanny), we will consider  the Romantic writer's fascination with the interior self,  daemonic models of Creation and creativity, and the vicissitudes of the melancholic poet in the changing public sphere.  Our focus will be the poetry and prose of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats--giving due attention to the longer works of these major poets--but we will also look at the writing that emerged at this time from the geographic and cultural margins of the two islands.   Of particular interest will be the ways in which our ongoing efforts to define "British Romanticism" in the 20th and 21st centuries have led--even when they have failed to circumscribe adequately that elusive object--to some of the most vital and controversial approaches to the study of literature in our time, from modernist reaction to the Romantic lyric to the recuperation of Romanticism for Cold War America (Abrams and Bloom) to the  deconstructive practice of Paul de Man and his successors.   Most recently we are witnessing  a revival of the nature school of Romantic poetry, particularly of the work of John Clare, that coincides with ecological approahces to literary study.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4109 Topics in English Literature

Readings in such authors as Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Mill, Arnold, and Pater.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 4110 Topics In Literature:

Comparing the literatures -- readings in the literature and theory of English and American Literature. Topics vary according to semester offerings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4111 Topics in Literature

Marking the centennial of his birth in 1924, this class will examine why James Baldwin became the twentieth-century African American author most loved in the twenty-first. An inexhaustible public witness and the author of poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories, the Harlem-born Baldwin ranks with the most daring and elegant American literary voices. His first novel, the autobiographical "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), wrestled with the dual heritage of Black Christianity and Depression-era Black social realism. His second novel, "Giovanni's Room" (1956), set in Paris and peopled with non-black characters, explored the intricacies of same-sex desire years before the Stonewall rebellion announced the gay rights movement. "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), the first collection of Baldwin's lush and searching essays and a grandparent of twenty-first century autocriticism, is perhaps the most-tweeted book of our era. Our reading list will contain all of these books, but we'll end with a sequence of texts revealing various facets of Baldwin's resurrected meaning in the wake of Black Lives Matter: among them, Ta-Nehisi Coates's memoir "Between the World and Me" (2015); Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" (2017); and Eddie Glaude Jr.'s Trump-era treatise "Begin Again" (2020). Altogether, this will be a single-author course on a singular author whose life after death illuminates crucial issues in Black cultural politics in two centuries. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4112 Topics in American Literature I

In some ways, this is a course about firsts. In 1930, novelist Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1938, novelist and memoirist Pearl S. Buck was the first American woman to win the Award and the third American overall (playwright Eugene O'Neill won it in 1936). Both were not only highly esteemed writers; Lewis a satirist of American classes and cultural manners, and Buck largely known for her realistic works about Asia (she grew up in China), the theme of the pull of tradition against rebellion, and her biographies of her missionary parents. Both were popular as well: Lewis's novels Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Mantrap, Dodsworth, Ann Vickers, and Cass Timberlane were made into films. Buck's novels The Good Earth, Dragon Seed, China Sky, and Pavilion of Women were made into films as well as her script for what turned out to be Leo McCarey's last film, Satan Never Sleeps. Except for Lewis's dystopian novel about a fascist takeover of the United States, It Can Happen Here, the works of neither author are as read as they were at the authors' height of fame. This course is an exploration of some the major and lesser-known works of Lewis and Buck, and a consideration of their status in American letters. Why did their best works make the impact they did? And how did their work affect the direction of American literature, particularly from the 1920s through the 1940s?

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4113 Slavery and the American Imagination

In this course we will read, think about, discuss, and analyze a variety of texts in which the experience of the American slave is remembered, memorialized, or recreated. Members of the class will gain a profound appreciation of how the tumultuous lives of men and women in bondage have been transformed into literature.  This is a class intended for advanced students, generally in English and African American studies; graduate students may also take this course for credit but will have additional assignments.  Possible requirements:  Regular reading logs; a bibliography assignment; an oral presentation; an 8-10 page research paper.  Satisfies the American Requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 4114 Topics in American Literature II: Modernisms in America

This course offers an advanced introduction to both the literature and the concept of modernism, the ism used to mark the experimental verve of early twentieth-century writing and to grasp its ties to modernity, or the modern social world. As the course title suggests, we will devote most of our time to the career of modernism in the United States, a place imagined as both the modernist nation par excellence and the desert modernism escaped to be born. Three groups of primary texts--early modernist experiments, 1920s modernist landmarks, and Great Depression revisions--will illuminate the grand ambitions of eccentric literary forms and sequestered avant-garde movements; the public disputes and buried alliances between high expatriate and Harlem Renaissance modernisms; and the influential Depression-era reinterpretation of modernism as reactionary self-indulgence. The syllabus will feature fiction, poetry, and drama by old and new literary celebrities: Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Meridel LeSueur, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright. A shorter list of critical essays will highlight modernism's tendency to theorize itself while introducing 21st-century perspectives from the New Modernist Studies. Satisfies the American requirement. For undergraduates, Junior or Senior standing is required.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4115 Topics in American Literature II

Fiction not often found in the standard survey course, such as Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware, G. W. Cable's The Grandissimes, Frank Norris' The Octopus, Jack London's Martin Eden, Thornton Wilder's Heaven's My Destination, Dorothy Baker's Young Man With a Horn, R. P. Warren's All the King's Men, Thomas Pyncheon's V, short works by Edith Wharton and Ring Lardner.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4116 Topics in African-American Literature

In this course, we'll be bridging two interdisciplinary fields- the digital humanities and Black diaspora studies- in order to examine how technology has mediated new engagements with the Black Atlantic. Following the concept of "juxtaposition," what Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam see as the intersection "of disciplines, cultures, and methods" (The Digital Black Atlantic 2021), this course will consist of traditional class discussion, writing assignments, and lab days that bridge theory, method, and application. Ultimately, we will aim to discover how scholars utilize digital tools to engage with and better understand the cultures, histories, and literatures of the Black diaspora. We will examine a broad range of scholarship, such as Brittle Paper, an online literary magazine, "Digital Nollywood," "The Global Poetics Project," and "Archive of Languages and Oral Resources of Africa," which are digital archives and repositories, "Migration Stories: Africans in Midwestern Communities," a digital storytelling initiative, and the web series "Left of Black," which is a multimedia source. Throughout the semester, students will learn to work with DH tools like Voyant and Omeka, will conduct text analysis, develop maps and network models, and learn how to utilize and build databases. Readings and classwork will be supplemented by practicums, and a small-scale final DH project will serve as an entry-point into both the public and digital humanities.  This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 4117 Early American Literature: American Modernisms

his seminar offers an advanced introduction to both the literature andthe concept of modernism, the ism used to mark the experimental verve of early twentieth-century writing and to grasp its ties to modernity, or the modern social world. As the course title suggests, we will devote most of our time to the career of modernism in the United States, a place imagined as both the modernist nation par excellence and the desert modernism escaped to be born. Three groups of primary texts--early modernist experiments, 1920s modernist landmarks, and Great Depression revisions--will illuminate the grand ambitions of eccentric literary forms and self-sequestered avant-garde movements; the public disputes and buried alliances between high expatriate and Harlem Renaissance modernisms; and the influential Depression-era reinterpretation of modernism as reactionary self-indulgence. The syllabus will feature fiction, poetry, and drama by old and new literary celebrities: Djuna Barnes, John DosPassos, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway, Ella Larsen, Meridel LeSueur, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen,Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright. A shorter list of critical essays will highlight modernism's tendency to theorize itself whileintroducing 21st-century perspectives from the New Modernist Studies.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 4118 The American Renaissance

Literature of the mid-nineteenth century with attention to social and intellectual backgrounds and the sources of the transcendentalist movement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4119 American Literature: The Rise of Realism to World War I

The maturing of American literature from the regional origins of realistic fiction just prior to the Civil War through the early naturalist novel and the beginnings of modern American poetry.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4120 Modernism and Postmodernism

Readings in early sources of 20th-century developments, followed by a selective survey of literary discourse from the 1920s through the 1990s in the United States. Prerequisites: junior standing and 6 units of literature or graduate standing.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4121 American Fiction Since 1945

This course is an advanced survey of the American novel from 1945 to 1999. We will consider a range of topics: the impact of America's growing superpower status during the Cold War; the usefulness of the nation as an organizing principle for studying literature in an increasingly globalized world; the presence of the Second World War and the Holocaust in American culture; the relationship between the social changes of the period (civil rights, feminism, counterculture, and the rise and fall of the new left) and literary history; the impact of technology on models of communication (literary and otherwise); and the relationship between large-scale demographic changes (immigration, the rise of the suburb, the movement towards a post-industrial economy) and literary practice.  NOTE:  Undergraduates should enroll in section 01 and graduate students in section 02.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM

ELIT 4122 Early Drama

This unit is concerned with English and European drama and spectacle from late Roman theatre onwards: primarily in England, but with comparative material from France and Italy. The chronological span of the course will end at about 1600; the working assumption is that there is no clean break between 'medieval' and 'Renaissance' drama, but that the theatres and scripts of the late sixteenth century should be understood as developing out of, as well as departing from, earlier theatrical traditions and practices.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4123 Topics in Renaissance Drama

A study of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical culture--the plays, players, playwrights, and audiences of public theaters, private theaters, and banqueting halls. Study includes the plays of Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marston, Middleton, Webster, and Shakespeare.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4124 Reading in the Renaissance: Literature and Media in Early Modern England

Examination of reading practices among original audiences for Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Marvell, Rochester, and Dryden and application to our understanding and experience of early modern texts.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4125 Topics In Literature

Varies from semester to semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 4126 Literary Theory

Literary Theory course

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4127 Modernism

James Joyce's "Ulysses" is probably the most important novel of the twentieth century, possibly of English literary history. It is one of the funniest but also, supposedly, one of the most challenging and difficult. As such, it lends itself to the sustained single focus of a 400-level English course. In 2024, as we read the novel on its 102nd birthday (2/2/24), we will be asking why it continues to speak to and through novelists as various as Zadie Smith and Samuel Beckett and engage the imaginations and intelligences of readers and writers alike. We will read the book first of all for its intrinsic interest, examining the use of the Homeric parallel as well as of the various organizational schemes Joyce devised in writing the story. We will also reference the novel to a number of external contexts: as an example of the emergent project of literary Modernism; as an imaginative remaking of the concepts of race and ethnicity as well as the political and religious cultures of the Ireland in which Joyce grew up; as a vision of a new Europe in the aftermath of the First World War; as a daring experiment in fashioning new gender imaginaries, for female as well as male characters; and, ultimately, as a reinvention of the form of the novel, which extends tendencies in modern linguistic thought to unprecedented dimensions. We'll supplement and enrich these considerations with various critical accounts of the novel, ranging from helpful expositions of Joyce's art to understandings of the novel's impact on subsequent literary and cultural history. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 4128 Literature of Catastrophe

In this course we will examine the ways in which art, both literary and visual attempt to adress catastrophic events.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 4129 Readings in American Literature

In this class we will examine the relationship between 21st-century American fiction and the new forms of community and commerce made possible by the Web. How have developments like Facebook, online gaming, and the blogosphere shaped contemporary narrative innovation? What do these writers have to say about the egalitarian potential, aesthetically and politically, of these new technologies? How do old media types relate to new media values like "interactivity" and "the wisdom of crowds"? Readings will likely include texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dennis Cooper, Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Shelley Jackson, Tao Lin, Thomas Pynchon, Jess Walter, and contributors to the Electronic Literature Collection.  Satisfies the Twentieth century and beyond requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4130 Irish Women Writers

Giving close attention to the social, political, and particularly post-colonial and feminist contexts of these authors, we will read the works of such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Lady Gregory, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Edna O'Brien, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.  We will consider the ways in which the Irish situation may prove problematic for now standard post-colonial and feminist paradigms and in particular the ways in which the innovative Irish woman writer makes of this necessity a creative strength.  Please note that Ni Chuilleanain will be reading poetry on campus this spring.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4131 Modern British and American Poetry

Modern poetic forms, schools and techniques. Readings in such poets as Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Moore, Auden, Bishop, Hill.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4132 Modern Poetry I: Modernisms

American and British poetry before, during, and after World War I. Readings include Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Stein, Eliot, Williams, Moore, Johnson, Pound, H.D. and Stevens, as well as selections from Wordsworth, Whitman and Dickinson. First half of two-course sequence; second half optional

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4133 Topics in Irish Literature: Modern Irish Poetry

Topics course in Irish literature.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4134 20th-Century Irish Poetry

In this course we will read poems by Ireland's most important 20th-century poets in historical, biographical, postcolonial, and mythological context.  Beginning with the writings of Yeats that were most influential, we will then read poems by his immediate heirs:  Clarke, Kavanagh, and MacNeice.  Of the living poets we will read books by John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, and Eilean NiChuilleanain.  We will consider the ongoing relevance of Irish language and myth for these poets, looking (for example) at excerpts from Kinsella's masterful translation of The Tain and tracking the unlikely persistence of the Irish in Muldoon's post-modern narratives.  Students are strongly encouraged to take time before the class begins to familiarize themselves with Ireland's thorny history.  Two texts are especially recommended for historical background: Roy Foster's "Modern Ireland" and Declan Kiberd's "Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation" (both are available in paperback).  Requirements: attendance at Paul Muldoon's reading on March 17 at the International Writers Center, an oral report on one of the poets we are reading, a 5-7 page close reading of a poem, and a final paper that may develop from the oral report.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4135 The Irish Literary Revival

The class will study major writings by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, James Joyce, & Flann O'Brien within the contexts of the language movement, colonialism, cultural nationalism, the socialist movement and the 1913 Lockout, the Easter Rising and the War for Independence, the Civil War, the founding of the Irish Free State, the Partition, and the Irish Theocracy. Wilde's notions of the primacy of art with regard to politics and their elaboration by W. I. Thompson and Declan Kiberd will be an organizing principle in the course. The class will see two films, offer oral reports, and write papers.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 4136 English Novel of the Eighteenth Century

Prose fiction by such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4137 English Novel of the 19th Century

Prose fiction by such writers as Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontæs, and Hardy.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4138 The Modern Novel

Content and craft in the varying modes of the American, British, and continental modern novel by such writers as James, Joyce, Lawrence, Faulkner, Kafka, Mann, Gide, Camus.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4139 British Fiction After Modernism

Course attempts to identify characteristics of British postmodern fiction: experimental novels of the 1970s and 1980s -- works by, for example, John Fowles, Alasdair Gray, and Martin Amis; the devolution of British fiction into its constituent Scottish and English strands in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as its simultaneous globalizing as diasporic novelists wrote from Britain about home. Younger writers, in frequently provocative ways, address the questions of nation, place, class, and sexual identity that have dominated the post-war period.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 4140 Contemporary Fiction

This course will cover contemporary fiction.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4141 The Modern European Novel

"A register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" -- that is what Gibbon said history is.  Being another kind of historian, the novelist confronts these selfsame catastrophes, this wreckage that human nature brings to pass.  And whether what he chronicles is upon the great stage of events or upon the secret stage of the heart, the truth the novelist tells us must always be that of individuals overmatched by crimes and follies and misfortunes.  Pathos is the novelist's stock-in-trade.  We shall study the modern pathos, the particularly painful record of twentieth-century history -- a sequence of unexampled barbarisms alongside of (and interconnected with) the unexampled advances in science and technology -- through novels from several different national traditions.  Our working assumption is that these books, at the end of the day, can best tell us what to make of the crimes, the follies, and misfortunes of Europe in our century: The Road into the Open (Arthur Schnitzler); The Vatican Cellars (Andre Gide); The Trial (Franz Kafka); The Confessions of Zeno (Italo Svevo); Young Torless (Robert Musil); Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (Thomas Mann); The Gift (Vladimir Nabokov); Journey to the End of Night (Louis-Ferdinand Celine); Kaputt (Curzio Malaparte); The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Evelyn Waugh); Cancer Ward (Alexander Solzhenitsyn).  Prior to our first meeting, and with a view to beginning to sort out the place of historical events in modern fiction, students are asked to read two works telling not of our own but of other centuries -- Memoirs of Hadrian (Marguerite Yourcenar) and The Leopard (Giuseppe di Lampedusa), both available now at the University bookstore.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4143 The Shaping of Modern Literature

Themes and major figures associated with the shaping of the modern literary imagination, including such topics as Freudian and Jungian versions of the self, phenomenological thought, the symbolist imagination, and such masters as Hegel, Kafka, Kierkegaard, William and Henry James. Topics vary each semester; consult Course Listings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4144 The Shaping of Modern Literature

Hardy, at the end of an era and on the cusp of transition, and Kafka, a central paradigm of modernism, may seem an odd couple.  But when we read them together, feel their relentless tragi-comic resistance to cultural solace and synthesis, they have real chemistry and illuminate the philosophical, historical and narrative passages from the 19th to 20th century.  Major readings and discussion of Hardy's Tess, Jude, selected poetry, autobiographical and journal entries of both authors, Kafka's stories and fables.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4145 Shaping of Modern Literature: Modernity After the Millenium

Over the past two decades, modernity (understood roughly as the era inaugurated by the second half of the eighteenth century, with Enlightenment reformation leading to Romantic revolution) has been characterized in several ways, depending on whether or not it is seen as having finally come to an end in the second half of the twentieth century.  Against Francois Lyotard's 1984 account of a distinctly "postmodern condition," Albrecht Wellmer argues for "the persistence of modernity," whereas Bruno Latour proposes that "we have neer been modern."  In conjunction with the book-length works in which these theorists forcefully flesh out their contrary positions, we will read several influential literary texts (fiction and/or poetry) from the early and mid-twentieth century as well as a handful of important texts published in the past decade.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 4146 Topics in English Literature I

Studies in special subjects, e.g., allegory and symbolism in the medieval period, the sonnet in English literature, English poetry and politics. Consult Course Listings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4147 Topics in English Literature II

Variable topics, such as Travel and Colonization in the Renaissance; Renaissance Skepticism and the Literature of Doubt.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4148 Topics in English Literature

We all love our things -- our Supreme streetwear, Nike sneakers, Iphones -- but we rarely take time to analyze what our attachment to these things means. In this class, we will visit the origins of modern consumer culture to find some answers. We will investigate narratives that claim to be written by things, poems in which persons become things, and narrators who obsess about things. We will read these literary texts alongside works that will help us think about the nature of our attachments, about the gift, the fetish, and what it means to be a person. Our working assumption will be that the early days of commodity culture are especially revealing for insights into our relationships to things. Satisfies the Eighteenth Century requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: ENL

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4149 Topics in English Literature and History: The 17th Century

Variable topics, such as Writing, Politics, and Society in Revolutionary England, Life Writing and Literature in Early Modern England.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4150 Topics in European Literature & History

This new course offers advanced undergraduates and graduate students the opportunity to work with a faculty member in the development of an individual professor's research project.  The aim is to expose the student to the practices as well as the principles of advanced literary research.  Each student will participate in the growth of the scholarly concept and help with the progress of its documentation and elaboration, at once learning the craft of research by example and turning the lessons to work of their own.  The outcomes foreseen include the extension and refinement of the faculty member's project and substantial progress on the part of the students toward publishable work of their own.  The faculty project at the center of this course is a book-length study, "A Literary History of the European War of 1914-1918," which entails a comparative study of the literatures written from the major nations in the First World War (Great Britain, France, and Germany).  As students make progress toward publishable work of their own, they may be working within the large subject of this book or in related historical and literary directions.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4151 Banned Books

Why would anyone want to burn a book?  Under what circumstances would you support censorship?  Several years ago, a Russian student was exiled to Siberia for possessing a copy of Emerson's ESSAYS.  Today, school boards in the United States regularly call for the removal of HUCKLEBERRY FINN and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE from classrooms and library shelves.  Actions like these dramatize the complex interconnections of literature and society, and they raise questions about what we read and the way we read.  We will explore these issues by looking closely at several American and translated European texts that have been challenged on moral, socio-political or religious grounds; we will try to determine what some readers have found so threatening about these works.  Possible authors: Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Defoe, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Twain, Chopin, Brecht, Salinger, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury.  Brief daily writing assignments.  This course is directed primarily, though not exclusively, to future teachers.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4152 Topics in World Literature & History

Fabricate: To construct or build; to form by art or labor, sometimes implying the use of the imagination; to invent; to devise falsely; to lie.  We will read the fabrications of some of the great and near-great autobiographers, including five or six of the following: Rousseau (Confessions), Franklin (Autobiography), Goethe (Italian Journey), Wordsworth (The Prelude and other poetry), John Stuart Mill (Autobiography), Edmund Gosse (Father and Son), Mary McCarthy (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood), and John Updike (Self-Consciousness).  Topics will include the (re)construction of the self, the transformation of biographical patterns as they appear in fiction (Updike) and non-autobiographical prose (Mill), modern approaches to autobiography as a genre, and psychological theories of personality.  During the last few weeks of the course we will study one writer, Ernest Hemingway, in depth, exploring the relationship between biography (Kenneth Lynn's Hemingway), autobiography (A Moveable Feast), mythicized or transposed autobiography (The Nick Adams Stories), and the novel (The Sun Also Rises and/or The Garden of Eden).

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4153 Topics in World Literature and History

This course will combine practical experience in translation with close examination and comparison of existing translations of major works, including -- tentatively -- passages from the Bible, the Tao te Ching, Homer and other classical poets and playwrights, Dante, Villon, Moliere, on up to more modern writers such as Baudelaire, Dostoievski, Proust, and Szymborska.  The approach will be less theoretical than analytical, focusing on the intricacies and nuances of language as they are brought into relief by the demands of translation, as well as on how translations change over time, depending on idiomatic shifts and cultural climates.  For instance, we might look at Pope's translation of a passage of Homer alongside later versions, up to the present (e.g., Robert Fagles' Homer), to discover what the translators' choices indicate about changing literary values and tastes.  Bi-lingual editions of certain works may be used.  Issues such as the relation of translation to adaptation and paraphrase may be addressed.  Guest translators will be invited occasionally to discuss their work.  Each student's major seminar project will be: either a brief (10-20 page) translation to be presented in class or, for those students not sufficiently versed in a foreign language, a presentation tracing the translation history of a single work and comparing versions of a particular passage in it (which will also be submitted as a paper).  Open to graduate students and well-qualified seniors.  Students in The Writing Program, Comparative Literature, and Classics are especially encouraged to enroll.  Knowledge of one or more foreign languages is desirable but not essential.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4154 History of the English Language

Concepts and methods of linguistical study: comparative, historical, and descriptive. Application of methods to selected problems in the history of English. Contrastive analysis of excerpts from Old, Middle, and later English; sounds, meanings, syntax, and styles.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4155 Frankenstein

As the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein recently passed, this class will study both the novel's origins and its powerful and abiding influence on our culture across a wide range of disciplines. The text itself is complex and layered, responding to its literary precursors, Enlightenment science, radical politics, aesthetic theory, feminism, Romantic idealism, Gothic horror, and more. In order to understand these influences, we will examine texts read by Mary Shelley (and her characters), including letters, essays, poems, and scientific reports. Our study of the novel's afterlives will begin with R. B. Peake's 1823 play, Presumption, which shaped much of the popular understanding of the Frankenstein myth during the 19th century. Our investigation of 20th- and 21st-century manifestations of Frankenstein will focus on its appearance in film, racial discourse, scientific ethics, popular culture, and advertising. This portion of the course will include a viewing of the iconic 1931 Boris Karloff film, which established indelible versions of the mad scientist and his "monster." Students in this seminar will be supported in developing individual final projects of their own design. For the English major, this course satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4156 Selected English Writers I

Concentrated study of one or two major English writers, e.g., Spenser, Dickens, Blake, Yeats. Consult Course Listings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4157 Selected American Writers I

Concentrated study of one or two major American writers, e.g., Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright; Emily Dickinson. Consult Course Listings each semester for specific authors.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 4158 Chaucer

Readings in the Canterbury Tales. Lectures on background; critical analysis.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4199 Milton

Major poems and prose works in relation to literary and intellectual currents of the 17th century.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4200 Spenser

Readings in the Faerie Queene and Shepheardes Calender, with attention to Spenser's deliberate fashioning of a literary career.

Credit 3 units. Art: HUM

ELIT 4201 The Spenser Lab

This course involves graduate and undergraduate students in the ongoing work of the Spenser Project, an inter-institutional effort to produce a traditional print edition of the Complete Works of Edmund Spenser.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4299 Research Lab

This class allows faculty members to work on their research in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students. The content of the class (and its subtitle) will be determined by the faculty member's research project; its primary activities will involve the students in making concrete contributions to the faculty member's research. The basic idea is to create a collaborative environment akin to a lab, in which researchers of various skills pursuing various tasks contribute to a distinctive project.

Credit 3 units. Arch: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 4300 The Business of Books

Book publishing shapes our literary and intellectual landscape in defining ways, yet only with the recent rise of Publishing Studies has the theory and practice of publishing become a serious subject of attention within the academy. This course offers a broad introduction to publishing, with a practical emphasis on contemporary literary publishing. We will explore how publishing communities form in relation to aesthetics, demographics, and technologies, and will consider how ethics and business practices are defined within these communities. On the applied side, we will study editing, contracts, marketing, sales & distribution, infrastructure, and media, and students will write reader's reports, marketing plans, and a final paper analyzing a contemporary publishing project and placing its work in relation to the historical and cultural context, demonstrating how each particular publishing practice is adapted to its own cultural ecosystem. Industry professionals will visit to speak with the class by Zoom, and Professor Riker brings two decades of experience as a book publisher, author, and reviewer. Alongside these other activities, over the course of the semester students will follow the progression of a book published by the nationally acclaimed publishing house Dorothy, a Publishing Project, of which Professor Riker is the publisher.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 4501 The Spenser Lab

In this Writing Intensive course, the students will be given a variety of writing tasks: writing commentaries, introductions, software manuals, grant proposals, software requirements, and design documents (SRDDs).

Credit 4 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 4996 English Literature Elective: 4000-Level

This course is used for transcribing ELIT 4000-level elective units.

Credit 3 units. EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

ELIT 4999 Independent Study

This course is for independent study in English Literature.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 1995 Children's Studies Coursework Completed Abroad

This course is designed for study abroad credit.

Credit 0 units.

Typical periods offered: Summer

CHST 1996 Children's Studies Elective: 100-Level

This course is designed for transfer credit.

Credit 3 units. EN: H, S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 2995 Children's Studies Coursework Completed Abroad

This course is designed for study abroad credit.

Credit 0 units.

Typical periods offered: Summer

CHST 2996 Children's Studies Elective

This course is designed for transfer credit.

Credit 0 units. EN: H, S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 2999 Internship in Children's Studies

This course offers up to three hours of academic credit (on a pass/fail basis) for an unpaid internship with an outside organization in some area of Children's Studies. Enrollment is restricted to Children's Studies minors and will require completion of a final written project as well as coordination with a site supervisor. For more information, please contact Dr. Wendy Anderson at andersonwl@wustl.edu or 314-935-9523.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 3000 Interdisciplinary Introduction to Children's Studies

What is childhood? Is it supposed to be happy? And what can children's books, toys, and memoirs tell us about the experience of childhood in a certain time and place? This course is designed to introduce students to the field of children's studies, including readings in the history and literature of global childhood, excerpts from children's films and TV, visits from Wash U. faculty studying children across various disciplines, and real or virtual field trips to a children's museum and a juvenile detention facility. The course is intended to give students a richly detailed picture of how children and childhood are dealt with as subjects throughout the curriculum and the impact these approaches have had on how the greater society thinks about children. Freshmen are welcome to enroll. This course fulfills the Social Contrasts requirement in Arts & Sciences.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 3003 Children's Publishing: History, Context & Craft

Publishing for children requires creativity, craft, and the ability to engage with the complex culture of childhood. This course will examine various facets of the children's publishing world-its history, its creative products, and its professional applications. In this course, we will explore critical moments in the history of children's publishing, including the innovations of notable publishers both in the Ango-American context and in East Asia, highlighting how social, educational, and technological factors impact publishing outputs. As part of this study, we will also explore current publishing houses and their philosophies, and interrogate a publisher's responsibility amid contemporary controversies. An analysis of representative and innovative board books, picture books, early readers, middle grade novels, and young adult graphic novels will facilitate a deeper understanding of genre, audience, and trends.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

CHST 3005 Childrens Picture Books: Culture and Content

Even in our world of apps and e-readers, paging through a picture book remains a beloved pastime for children. What has allowed the picture book to persist as a cultural object for over 300 years and what can it teach us about childhood? In this course, we will examine the history of the picture book, from the earliest illustrated educational texts to John Newbery's groundbreaking delights to the socially conscious picture books of the 21st century. We will use the picture book to trace important social and educational movements given its use as a tool to impart cultural values and knowledge. We will also examine important moments in picture book publishing history, most notably, the post-war Little Golden Books phenomenon. Authors and illustrators of study will include Randolph Caldecott, Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Bruno Munari, Jerry Pinkney, Eric Carle, Tana Hoban, Leo and Diane Dillon, and Christian Robinson. Students will engage critically with both text and image, delving into the way images communicate meaning. The course will also contemplate important contemporary issues, most notably, race and representation in picture books and the rise of picture book bans. This course is well-suited for students interested in illustration, education, publishing, and cultural studies, and is appropriate for students pursuing the children's studies minor. This course will count towards the Publishing Concentration. For the concentration this course will provide a publishing elective.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

CHST 3330 Children and Censorship: What We Permit Children to Read and Why

The books that raise the issue of censorship most intensely are those written for children, not adults. Today, when parents seem more concerned than ever about what their children are exposed to, what children should read has become a burning issue, but an issue that often divides communities rather than uniting them. What is appropriate for children to read? Has this changed over time? Who determines what is appropriate reading material? And how have the issues of gender and race affected these determinations? In this course we will read and discuss many controversial children's books and comics, starting with Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo, and work our way through to such modern children's authors as Sherman Alexie, Judy Blume, Maurice Sendak, Walter Dean Myers, and J.K. Rowling as well as R. Crumb's controversial and sexually explicit underground comics.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 3410 Children and Childhood in World Religions

This course will investigate the roles children play in some of the world's major religious traditions and how those traditions construct their concepts of childhood. From child disciples to child martyrs, from the miraculous childhoods of religious founders to the rites marking childhood's end, and from divine commandments involving fertility to those mandating celibacy, we will explore a wide range of different religions' teachings about children and childhood. We will combine primary and secondary sources including written texts, movies/video, and web-based content in order to learn more about the complex relationships between children and the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

CHST 3420 Childhood, Culture, and Religion in Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean World

From child saints to child scholars and from child crusaders to child casualties, the experience of childhood varied widely throughout the European Middle Ages. This course will explore how medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims developed some parallel and some very much divergent concepts of childhood, childrearing, and the proper cultural roles for children in their respective societies. Our readings will combine primary and secondary sources from multiple perspectives and multiple regions of Europe and the Mediterranean World, including a few weeks on the history and cultural legacy of the so-called Children's Crusade of 1312. We will conclude with a brief survey of medieval childhood and its stereotypes as seen through contemporary children's books and TV shows. This course fulfills the Language & Cultural Diversity requirement for Arts & Sciences.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

CHST 3996 Children's Studies Elective

Course is used for transcribing 3000-level CHST elective units.

Credit 3 units. EN: H, S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

CHST 4000 Senior Seminar in Children's Studies

The WU Children's Studies Minor brings together a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches to the study of children and childhood. In this one-credit seminar, meeting for five three-hour evening sessions, junior and senior Children's Studies minors will discuss a series of interdisciplinary readings about the past and future of Children's Studies as a field, reflect on their own pasts and futures in the Children's Studies Minor, and create and present portfolios of their minor experience. This course is a capstone experience for the minor in Children's Studies. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing and a minor in Children's Studies.

Credit 1 unit. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 4070 Topics in Youth Studies

This course is designed as a special topics on youth studies. The focus examines youth as a cultural group in the US and global context. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore youth, media arts, and culture and draws on education, sociology, cultural studies, and literature. Such topics as youth development, youth engagement, and youth empowerment provide entry points for understanding youth as learners, consumers, producers, and active members of society. Central to the course are youth's very own textual productions, including but are not limited to poems, performances, visual art, short documentaries, music videos, web blogs, and podcasts, among others. Readings, discussions, and other activities will culminate in an inquiry-based multimedia project about youth or a specific youth group/organization.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

CHST 4996 Children's Studies Elective

Course is used for transcribing 4000-level CHST elective units

Credit 3 units. EN: H, S

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

CHST 4999 Independent Work in Children's Studies

This course provides credit for Children's Studies Minors who undertake a program of independent reading and/or research under the supervision of a faculty mentor on some subtopic within Children's Studies for which there is no regular course available. Please contact the Academic Coordinator for more information.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 1004 Writing Identity

Who are you? This simple question becomes ever more complicated the more closely you examine it. How should you define yourself? By ancestry, hometown, gender, cultural allegiance, ethnic background, nationality, sexual preference, social class, personal history, fashion sense, career aspirations, taste in music, or by some other category? This course will examine the complexities of identity as they have been expressed in a wide variety of modern literary (and some philosophical) writings in order to develop the advanced reading, writing, and research skills that students need in a university setting. This course will satisfy the Writing 1 requirement.

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 1996 Writing Elective: 100-Level

Credit 3 units. EN: H

WRITING 2000 Rhetoric and Power

The study of rhetoric, one of the original seven Liberal Arts, is perhaps more relevant today, in a world where diverse opinions reverberate 24/7 from television and the internet, than in ancient times when rhetors invented arguments to help people choose the best course of action when they disagreed about important political, religious, or social issues. How do we make our voices heard? How can we invent and present compelling written discourse. This course will introduce students to common rhetorical principles and to the disciplinary history of rhetoric and compositional studies. Assignments in this class include rhetorical exercise in invention and craft, imitations, and varied compositions, ranging from the personal to critical, from the biographical to argumentative. We will examine rhetorical principles (audience, context, kairos, exigency, ethos, pathos, logos, and so forth) that are employed, for example, not only in literary analysis but in law, politics, education, and science. We will aim for a mastery of craft and a refinement of thought.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 2001 Writing the Visual World

Art, like writing, is a form of storytelling. Yet while writers and artists set out with a purpose-a clear vision and intention-those motives may change or evolve throughout the creative process. In Bird by Bird, for instance, Anne Lamott likens the writing process to "watching a Polaroid develop." As a writer, she claims, "[y]ou can't-and, in fact, you're not supposed to-know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing." It is only after "the portrait comes into focus, [that] you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are." Likewise, in At Work, Annie Leibovitz recalls staging the portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in "their apartment in the Dakota early in December" of 1980. Initially, Leibovitz had a clear vision and mission in mind; she conceived of the photo as a moment of stolen intimacy: "a simple kiss in a jaded time." But everything changed in an instant-in the blink of an eye. That night, Lennon was shot and killed while returning to the Dakota. In retrospect, recounts Leibovitz, the portrait "looks like a last kiss." This is a course about stories and storytelling. What stories do we tell and what stories are we told?? How does art (written, visual, and performative) enable us to share our experiences-to bring purpose and meaning to our lives and to the lives of others? Throughout this course, we will explore these (and other) questions by drawing from a broad range of discourse communities, including (but not limited to) art history, sociology, psychology, film studies, and cultural studies. We will read, write, and share (both instructor and students) expository prose (personal, persuasive, and interpretative) to consider our perception of and place within the visual world. This course does not count toward the Creative Writing Concentration. Design credit 3 units.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: CPSC, HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 2002 The Sentence in English

Though formal knowledge of English grammar is not always necessary for effective writing, learning it can help students understand how sentences are put together, and it can allow them to develop their own writing using a new set of skills. The Reed-Kellogg system of diagramming is a method of learning grammar by creating pictures, or maps, of sentences. These pictures show the logical relations between words, phrases, and clauses, and they illustrate the choices writers are making as they craft individual sentences. Using a recent textbook by Eugene Moutoux, we will learn to diagram sentences both famous and ordinary, both contemporary and of historical interest. Our aims will be (1) to learn both the rules and the peculiarities of English grammar, (2) to understand how the structure of a sentence can influence its meaning, and (3) to use this knowledge productively in crafting and revising our own prose. By the end of the course, students should be able to diagram just about any sentence in English, whatever the genre or time period, including their own. Extensive practice in writing and revising sentences will give students a consciousness of how grammar and syntax influence the meaning and effectiveness of their own writing.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 2010 Practice in Composition

Study in fundamentals of rhetoric, consistency in grammatical structure, and varieties of usage with attention to audience adaptation and the writer's style. Frequent practice in writing, primarily exposition, although specific assignments are determined by the needs of each class. Limit: 15 students. Prerequisite: E Comp 100 or equivalent.

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 2100 Creative Nonfiction Writing 1

A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing creative nonfiction. While the course will cover the major forms within the genre of creative nonfiction, including literary journalism, biography, profiles, nature writing and travel writing, special emphasis will be given to personal essay and memoir.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 2200 Fiction Writing 1

A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing fiction. PREREQ: Writing 1. 3 units.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 2300 Poetry Writing 1

A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing poetry. PREREQ: Writing 1. 3 units.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 2996 Writing Elective: 200-Level

Credit 3 units. EN: H

WRITING 2999 Journalism: Communications Internship

For students undertaking projects in newspaper or magazine journalism, in radio or television, or in business, government, foundations, and the arts. The student must secure permission of the Chair of the Undergraduate Committee, file a description of his or her project with the Department and, at the end of the semester, submit a significant portfolio of writing together with an evaluation by the internship supervisor. Up to three units acceptable toward the Writing Minor, but cannot be counted toward the English Major or Literature Minor. Prereq: Writing 1. Must be taken Credit/No Credit.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3000 Argumentation

This upper-level writing course considers the strategies of argumentation emphasizing audience awareness, reflective thinking and strategic presentation. We will explore elements of argument such as enthymeme, the three appeals, claim types, and fallacies. Students will learn to evaluate a wide range of arguments (including their own), considering the rhetorical strategies that make for effective argumentative performance in a given situation. The course will involve regular practice in both written and oral argument. Prereq: Writing 1 (L13 100) and junior standing. A note for students and advisors: when registering refer to WebStac for updated information on section times and available seats.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

WRITING 3001 Exposition

This advanced writing course considers style in relationship to audience and purpose, asking the writer to engage more consciously with writing conventions, and to explore strategies appropriate to various writing situations. PREREQS: Writing 1 (L13 100) and junior standing. A note for students and advisors: when registering refer to WebStac for updated information on section times and available seats.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3002 The Long Essay: Researched Writing

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 3003 Political Writing

Defined most simply, politics is that which pertains to the affairs of the polis, one's community. In its real-life context, writing always interacts with a community in some way, engaging a defined audience to produce an intended effect. In this sense, writing always touches the affairs of a polis, and thus, writing is inherently political, regardless of whether the writer considers this during composition. In this class, we will focus on explicitly political writing by writers who are not politicians, that is to say, sanctioned experts in the affairs of the polis. Foregoing public policy memoranda and economic analyses, we will look at how journalists, grassroots organizers, and creative writers have consciously written to intervene in the affairs of their communities despite their outsider status. Using techniques of rhetorical analysis and logical structure, we will examine how these writers crafted works that inspire and move audiences through the conventions of several genres: essay, polemic, journalism, and satire.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 3004 Writing and Medicine

Patients have always written about the experiences of being ill and of receiving treatment from doctors. Increasingly, doctors also are writing about their patients, and not always to praise them. Journalists are using the experiences of both patients and physicians to explore current problems in the health care system. We will read narrative and argumentative pieces by patients (such as Trillin, Hillenbrand, and Mairs), physicians (such as Gawande, Harper, Ofri, Chen, Khullar, and Mukherjee) and journalist-essayists (such as Specter, Epstein, and Aviv) to get a broad survey of the way these very public conversations among doctors, patients, and other stakeholders have been conducted over the past two decades or so. In this writing-intensive course, students will work on developing their own voices as writers, and on reading and commenting on the writing of their peers. Students will be enrolled from the waitlist; preference will be given to Medical Humanities minors, English majors and minors, and seniors.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3005 Writing the Natural World

For students interested in the environment and natural sciences. This course brings together essays from a wide range of communities including biology, physics, medicine, environmental studies, creative writing and more. Readings and assignments are intended to enhance students' understanding of the relationship between writing and their experience/knowledge of the natural world. Major assignments allow students to follow, explore, and write about their own unique interest in a related subject, and include a personal essay, an expository essay, and a researched argumentative essay, as well as peer review workshops, oral presentations, and revision. Students will record and explore their own experiences of nature in short creative assignments that prepare them for the major papers. Prerequisites: Writing 1 and junior standing.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3030 Imaginative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantast Writing

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 3080 Guided Research in Composition: Theory and Pedagogy of One-To-One Writing Instruction

This course teaches theoretical and practical approaches to the tutoring of writing, specifically focusing on tutoring writing within the context of undergraduate courses. Students will learn collaborative methods of tutoring writing, explore different approaches to writing comments on student work in various content areas, and examine the connections between writing and thinking. Students in this course will analyze their own writing processes and learn how to help others through the writing and revision process. Readings and discussions will focus on writing theory and pedagogy, and students will practice one-to-one methods in mock conferences and with sample essays. Assignments: two short essays, a longer research paper and presentation, and a journal.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 3090 Topics in Composition

An advanced writing course focusing on selected topics related to writing. Topics to be chosen by department/instructor. See section description for details about specific class emphases. (Note: In some cases, this course may be cross-listed with other programs/departments and may satisfy the writing-intensive requirement.) PREREQ: Writing 1 (L13 100) and junior standing.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3100 Creative Nonfiction Writing 2

This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Non-Fiction Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as writers and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Non-Fiction Writing 1.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3101 Creative Nonfiction: Personal Essay and Memoir

This is an intermediate course in writing creative nonfiction, with a concentration on personal essay and memoir. PREREQ: Creative Nonfiction Writing 1.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3102 Modern Humor Writing

This course will analyze and put into practice what makes good humor writing both good and humorous, from subject matter to the mechanics of setting up a punchline, from crafting an unexpected metaphor to perfecting the reversal.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3103 Music Journalism

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 3104 Cultural Journalism

In the Internet Age, journalism has migrated from traditional, or legacy institutions (book publishers, film & television production companies, newspapers) to digital versions of the same thing, however the craft remains tied to its legacy models. The migration online has endangered certain ecologies of journalistic practice - in particular, arts journalism, especially criticism, the long form investigative essay, and foreign reporting. The first two of these three fit under what I describe as cultural journalism, and our purpose in this class is to practice what have been Cultural Journalism's forms, at the same time as we inquire into the modes and genres that are its future.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3200 Fiction Writing 2

This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Fiction Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as writers and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Fiction Writing 1. 3 units.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3201 Fiction Writing: The Short-Short, Sudden Fiction, and Microfiction

This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Fiction Writing 1 or Poetry Writing 1 and wish to further explore the craft of fiction through the medium of the short-short story-a story. The course will focus on reading, writing, and thinking critically about short-shorts.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3202 Fiction Writing: Coming of Age in the Short Story

A fiction writing course that explores coming of age themes.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 3203 Fiction Writing: Stories in the Suburbs

In the fifties, the suburbs were still somewhat of a novelty in American culture-most people still lived in cities and small towns, or on the farm. Back then, Levitowns and the like were embraced with either gee-whiz optimism, or seen as sinister dystopias where youth, ideals, and romance went to fester and die. But now that the American mainstream is stucco McMansions, strip malls, and big box stores; now that the suburbs have become more ethnically diverse; now that literature is being generated from these places instead of just about them, how have stories set in the 'burbs changed? We'll read short stories written from the fifties until the present day exploring this particular setting, and, through a series of exercises, workshops, and our own short fiction, we'll explore the milieu as writers (whether we happen to be from the suburbs or not), always on the lookout for the unexpected in these familiar places.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 3204 Fiction Writing: Fiction and Obsession

Desire is at the heart of fiction, from the forces that drive the decisions characters make to the ways stories work on us as readers.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 3205 Fiction Writing: Historical Fiction

A literature/creative writing hybrid course, students will read a number of contemporary historical fictions and then write one of their own. We'll consider the ways in which these fictions inhabit, depart from, and reflect upon the historiography and history they're built from--upon the indeterminacy of the historical record, and the limits of its reach--but we'll also discuss fiction's reponsibility to historical facts and documents, and the relevance of fictions among non-fictions in approaching an event or figure. PREREQ: Writing 1, Fiction 1

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 3208 Imaginative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3210 Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Seminar

Credit 1.5 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM

WRITING 3300 Poetry Writing 2

This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Poetry Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as poets and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Poetry Writing 1. 3 units.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3400 Introduction to Playwriting

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3401 Topics in Composition

Topics intended to increase the range and skill of writers who have already attained satisfactory competence. Typical subjects include applications of classical and modern rhetoric, writing problems in a variety of professional fields, differences between essay and research writing. Prerequisites: College Writing and junior standing.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3402 Topics in Composition

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 3500 Copyediting

This course fulfills one of the requirements of the Publishing track in the English major, but all students who wish to improve their skills in editing and revision are welcome. We will begin with definitions of editing in the publishing world, but move quickly to focus on the practice of editing for grammar, syntax, and mechanics. While learning the conventions for edited prose suggested by the Chicago Manual of Style, we will note how arbitrary those conventions are by looking at other systems (e.g., MLA, APA, AMA) next to Chicago's. Two exams will assess what students have learned about editorial practice, including citation of source, as well as grammar, syntax, and style. Three written projects will ask students to do their most careful work in editing, analysis, and revision. The final project, with presentation, will ask students to learn about fact checking. Active participation in discussions of this often controversial material will be expected.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 3601 The Art of Publishing

This course introduces students to the art and craft of book publishing through a practical emphasis on types of writing and thinking that are specific to publishing, and by creative engagement with the variety of forms books now take in our culture. As part of our study, we will follow two different books through the publication process, studying the different roles (editor, designers, marketer, publicist) that contributed to their creation and their published life. We will have frequent class Zoom visits by book professionals who worked on the books we are studying, as well as writing assignments (such as reader's reports, jacket copy, and book reviews) that put you in the position of working on these titles yourself. And we will have creative assignments in which you apply what you've learned to hypothetical publishing projects of your own. NOTE: This course is one of three required courses for students enrolled in the Publishing Concentration.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 3900 Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Seminar

Credit 1.5 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 3901 Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Seminar

Credit 1.5 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 3902 Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Seminar

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 3903 Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship Seminar

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 3996 Writing Elective: 300-Level

Credit 3 units. EN: H

WRITING 3999 Independent Study

This independent study in creative writing is for students who have taken the 200-level introductory course in the genre they want to focus on with the instructor. The whole syllabus should be directed toward developing the student's higher-level skills, among them the capacity to reflect on craft methods. It is strongly recommended that two to four multiple-page written assignments be assigned over the course of the semester.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 4000 Prose Style in English: History and Craft

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 4090 Topics in Composition

Topics course to vary according to semester offerings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 4100 Advanced Nonfiction

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 4110 Proseminar in Writing: Nonfiction Prose

For students qualified to pursue their own projects in nonfiction prose; criticism by other members of the class and by the instructor. Limit: 12 students. Prerequisite: permission of instructor upon submission of writing samples.

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 4200 Advanced Fiction Writing

For qualified students who wish to continue their creative writing and reading through immersion in an intensive fiction workshop. Students wishing to enroll must not only register but also submit a 15 page (double-spaced) fiction sample. The sample must include a cover page with: your name, the semester you took Fiction Writing 2, and the name of the Fiction Writing 2 instructor. Submit samples to the English Dept. mailbox of the L13 421 instructor no later than April 20th. No one is officially enrolled in this class until contacted by the instructor. PREREQ: Writing 1, Fiction Writing 1, Fiction Writing 2.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 4210 Craft of Fiction

A literature/creative writing hybrid course; students will read a number of contemporary historical fictions-an increasingly important and innovative genre-and then write one of their own.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 4240 Poetry Tutorial

These credits are available to students who have completed Poetry I and Poetry II. This is an opportunity for students who have already completed Advanced Poetry, or who are not able to take Advanced Poetry because of scheduling conflicts, to meet individually with the instructor to develop a portfolio of poems. During weekly meetings students will explore various writing processes and revision techniques. There will be directed readings and discussions of selected topics related to contemporary poetry and poetics. Credits may be taken concurrently with Advanced Poetry. Permission of the instructor is required.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 4300 Advanced Poetry Writing

For qualified students who wish to continue their creative writing and reading through immersion in an intensive poetry workshop. Students wishing to enroll must not only register but also submit 8 poems. The sample must include a cover page with: your name, the semester you took Poetry Writing 2, and the name of the Poetry Writing 2 instructor. Submit samples to the English Dept. mailbox of the L13 421 instructor no later than April 20th. No one is officially enrolled in this class until contacted by the instructor. PREREQ: Writing 1, Poetry Writing 1, Poetry Writing 2. 3 units.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 4310 The Craft of Poetry

This course is for writers who wish to study long-form poetic composition and book arrangement. The major assignment will be to compose a poem or poetic sequence of considerable length. Gwendolyn Brooks (The Anniad) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Dictee) will be chief among our guides. We will study how poets arrange their books, and we will also make a brief foray into the material history of the book. Texts by Rosa Alcalá, John Ashbery, Daniel Borzutzky, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, George Oppen, Ed Roberson, Brian Teare, and Simone White will also be included. This course counts toward the creative writing concentration. Prerequisite: L13 322.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 4400 Topics in Composition

Composition topics course -- offerings will vary from semester to semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 4401 Critic as Writer

This course's premise is that critical writing--about fiction, poetry, visual art, and culture generally--is a genre capable of as full a range of expression as any, as potentially artful as any; that at its best, criticism is art. The course will be part survey, part workshop. The workshop aspect will entail writing two different works within the genre, chosen from among the various types of critical writing we survey. For the survey aspect, we'll read book reviews to manifestos to book-length poetic-critical hybrids. The goal is not really compare-and-contrasting but rather considering each form within its rhetorical context and seeing what we can learn. We might look at how a single writer handles various subjects, and at how various writers handle a single subject. Writers we have read in past years, and are likely to read this semester, include Susan Howe, James Baldwin, Dave Hickey, Anne Carson, William Carlos Williams, Carl Phillips, Susan Sontag, James Wood, Maggie Nelson, Oscar Wilde, Maureen N. McLane, and Renee Gladman. We will definitely read Roland Barthes. This course counts toward the Creative Writing Concentration.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 4402 Creative Writing Capstone Seminar

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

WRITING 4410 Writing for Children and Young Adults

In this course we will examine various genres of writing for young people: poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 4996 Writing Elective: 400-Level

Credit 3 units. EN: H

WRITING 4999 Independent Study

This independent study in creative writing is envisioned as more specialized than a 300-level course, with students intensively investigating a particular topic, theme, craft element, genre, and so on. Students should, along with the instructor, create an intensive reading list in the area of focus and complete a substantial creative project during the semester.

Credit 3 units. BU: SCI

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring