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 tweet. This offering is unlike other English courses, and in fact more closely resembles courses in history, foreign language, and science.
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 engages with "whiteness" as a category of identification in order to develop a theoretically informed understanding of the history, function, and effects of racial encoding within literature and upon the society it influences and reflects. Course materials offer a corrective to the tradition of Anglo-American and European denial of dominant racial construction(s), and grapple with implications of rendering "whiteness" visible.
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.
From 1968 to 2013, the Man Booker prize was awarded annually to the "finest" full-length novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland, and bestowed honor, recognition, and controversy upon the winning author. The Booker inhabits an uneasy intersection of high art and mass cultural approbation, and while the judges would likely assert that the prize considers aesthetic matters only, a more realistic assessment would suggest that issues of historical contingency inevitably inflect the selection process. By studying winning novels by such authors as J. G.
This course studies the British empire of the 19th Century and its slow dissolution during the course of the 20th century. The primary emphasis is on Britons' engagement with and responses to the idea of empire, as reflected in literary and non-literary texts of the time, and is informed by contemporary political and postcolonial theory.
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.
Beginning with the genre's origins in colonial America, this course historicizes and contextualizes the captivity narrative -- a category first constructed around white men and women living among Indians, or kidnapped by Barbary pirates and held captive in Africa -- in relation to the emergence of ideological American-ness in the colonial and early national periods.