The aim of this course is to come to an understanding of our English-language ancestries and to develop a critical appreciation for the lexicons that we carry with us in every utterance or essay, text or tale. This offering is unlike other English courses, and in fact more closely resembles courses in history, linguistics, and foreign languages.

Ranging in breadth from antiquity to the present, this course familiarizes students with a tradition of writing about art and literature and debates about the meaning and meaningfulness of literature. Core concerns may include historically changing definitions of the literary, arguments about the value of art and literature, methodological approaches to the study or interpretation of texts, the relationship between art and culture or society, theories of language and representation, and the relationship between representation and identity.

This course explores the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and sexual identity as expressed in literature. Students explore literary texts that address the intellectual, social, cultural, political, and philosophical contexts from which gendered and sexual identities emerge and in which they are contested or negotiated. The course addresses some or all of the following topics in any given semester: sexual politics and power; the relation of imperialism and racism to questions of gender; and the influence of gender on writing as an act of self-definition and political or social identification.

This course considers the Native American literary tradition and related historical and critical developments. Emphases vary by semester but are selected from major concerns and movements within the tradition and may include oral literatures, "mixed-race" and tribal identities, forced assimilation, literary colonialism, and American Indian nationalism. Students gain mastery of a critical vocabulary specific to the subject and, with increasing sophistication, articulate their own responses to the literature.

This course examines the city as a social, cultural, and historical construct. Drawing on texts from a variety of genres, as well as cultural products that may include diaries, maps, photographs, and motion pictures, students consider one, two, or three selected cities as they have developed over time. The course highlights the function of rhetorical and ideological constructions such as "the city," "citizenship," and "urbanity," and explores the symbolic and political associations of such terms.

This course studies the Christian Bible using the interpretive framework of literary studies. What kinds of knowledge, insight, and debates are produced when this collection of books -- one that has inspired countless other artistic and cultural expressions over the centuries -- is read as literature? Approaching the Bible in this way is to give special attention to questions about its authorship, historical contexts, source materials, and genres, as well as to the particular kinds of images, narratives, and motifs that weave in and out of its passages.

This course explores the theoretical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of the gothic literary tradition in the U.S. from its late 18th-century inception to the current day. Along with a variety of primary literature, students consider foundational theoretical texts (Freud, Lacan) and secondary sources relevant to the uniquely American iteration of the Gothic, particularly those that interrogate the tradition's functions as dark counter-narrative to progressive U.S. ideology.

This course is concerned with the endurance of the "Jane Eyre" story (itself an elaboration of the Cinderella myth). Beginning with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), students examine a variety of stories, novels, and films that rework aspects of Brontë's vision. Students study the context of each revision and its commentary on the original text and examine shifts in the critical and feminist reception of these texts. Texts vary, but are selected from the following: Braddon, Gissing, James, Woolf, Forster, du Maurier, Rhys, Kincaid, Balasubramanyam, Winterson.

Considered one of the greatest poems in the English language, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) is an epic that takes the reader from hell to heaven and everywhere in between. This is a story of identity and purpose within a seemingly infinite cosmos; of human responsibility to knowledge, the earth, and each other; and, especially, of the origins of suffering and injustice, and a blueprint of hope within a grand reconfiguration of what it means to be heroic.

This course focuses on one or more genres of popular writing. Examples include detective fiction, science fiction, fan fiction, westerns, romance novels, fantasy, or non-fiction. Students engage popular texts through rigorous literary analysis to ponder how such "light entertainments'' are inextricably linked to aesthetic, historical, and social circumstances.