Professors Davis, Hardy, Perry, K. Weese; Associate Professors Horne, Varholy; Assistant Professor Celeste.
Chair: Sarah B. Hardy
Note: The English Department offers several sections of the following 100-level courses each year. Please consult TigerWeb for the precise courses offered each semester. These courses are especially suitable for first- and secondyear students beginning the English major or satisfying the College’s general literature requirement. Students may take as many different 100-level literature courses as they like for credit, and all will satisfy the general literature requirement, but only one such course will fulfill a requirement for the English major.
All 300- and 400-level courses have the following prerequisite: any 100-level or 200-level literature course in the Department of English, or consent of the instructor.
ENGLISH 190. (3)
FATHERS AND SONS IN LITERATURE. This course explores how literature treats issues of masculinity as they are handed down and transformed from one generation to the next. With attention to literary fathers and sons, students develop techniques for reading and analyzing works from several historical periods and genres, possibly including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and/ or film. Related topics to be considered might include the representation of the family, the role of the artist, and the possibility of language as a place for experimentation and social change. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 191. (3)
LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN ROAD. This course will introduce students to literary analysis through works that explore the motif of the road, especially as it has flourished in American literature. We will attend to the relationship between the road and narrative structure, the road as a metaphor for life, the association of the road with outsiders, and the use of the road to further plot and character development. Readings will vary each semester, but may include fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Auster, and Cormac McCarthy; poetry by Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg; and selected drama and film. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 192. (3)
LITERATURE AND YOUTH. This course focuses on literary works--short stories, novels, poetry, some films--that dramatize the experience of coming of age in a complex world. Students read versions of the Bildungsroman (or novel of education) and the Künstlerroman (or novel of the growth of the artist), in the process considering the varying ways in which young men and young women experience the transition from youth to adulthood. In addition, students develop techniques of reading, interpreting, and analyzing works from several historical periods and genres. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 193. (3)
LAW AND LITERATURE. This course introduces students to literary analysis through a study of the intersections between legal discourse and literary writing. Students will sharpen their skills in reading literary texts and writing analytical arguments as they study works from several historical periods and genres that may include short stories, novels, essays, poetry, drama, and film. They will also read some case law. By considering both legal themes in fiction and literary elements in legal discourse, students will explore topics such as equality before the law, the unreliability of testimony, communal justice, and civic responsibility. They will also consider how competing narratives in fictional texts and in actual courtrooms complicate notions of justice. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 195. (3)
LITERATURE AND MEDICINE. Drawing on representations of illness, health, science, and the body, this course explores connections between the discourses of medicine and literary writing. Students will analyze literary, historical, and other cultural texts from a variety of traditions and told from the point of view of practitioners, patients, and onlookers. Topics to be considered might include questions of medical and narrative authority, storytelling and diagnosis, and how new technologies impact medical narratives. Readings will be chosen at the instructor’s discretion, but could include authors such as Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, and Margaret Edson and cultural texts such as The Patient Bill of Rights, as well as assorted poems, essays, and short stories. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 196. (3)
RELIGION AND LITERATURE. This course introduces students to literary analysis through an exploration of religious themes in literary works, such as the inexpressibility of the transcendent; the significance of suffering; the relationship between beauty and the divine; and our place within family, community, and history. The assigned texts will vary from semester to semester, but they may include work by fiction writers such as Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Kafka, O’Connor, Kawabata, McCarthy, and Ozick; poets such as Milton, Donne, Blake, Hopkins, Dickinson, Eliot, Stevens, Plath, Snyder, and Larkin; and dramatists such as Aeschylus, Beckett, and Shaffer. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 198. (3)
SEA STORIES. An introduction to maritime literature and the “blue humanities.” This course explores the ocean in the literary imagination, tracing how authors represent a world connected by water. By analyzing Anglophone poetry and prose from the eighteenth century to the present, students raise timely questions about the relationship between representation and reality, with particular attention to how literature shapes our cultural and environmental values. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 199. (3)
AMERICAN NATURE WRITING. This course will introduce students to how American literature negotiates the relationship between human beings and the natural world. We will examine American attitudes toward nature as a source of delight, terror, ethical wisdom, and revelation in some larger sense, as well as the evolution of American attitudes toward nature over time. With detailed attention to form, we will read works that ponder the connections between nature, health, and justice in the American landscape and that register the trauma of a natural world in peril. Readings will vary each semester but may include Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker, among others. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 211-212. (3-3)
BRITISH LITERATURE. The first semester surveys major authors, works, and literary types from the beginnings through the eighteenth century, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton; the second semester continues the history to the present day, including Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. Appropriate critical approaches other than the historical are employed. Prerequisite: none. Offered: 211 in the fall semester; 212 in the spring semester.
ENGLISH 221-222. (3-3)
AMERICAN LITERATURE. A general study of American literature from colonial times through the Civil War (221) and from the Civil War to the present (222). We focus especially on major figures: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman; Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Stevens, Hughes, Faulkner, Baldwin, and others. Prerequisite: none. Offered: 221 in the fall semester; 222 in the spring semester.
ENGLISH 224. (3)
INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE. The works of major African- American authors are treated historically and critically, with the aim of understanding what “the American experience” has meant to African- Americans. Poetry (from Dunbar to Rita Dove) and fiction (from Toomer to Morrison) are the main concerns, but some attention is also given to non-fiction prose (from Douglass to Malcolm X). Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 226. (3)
LITERATURE AND GENDER. This course employs gender as a category of analysis for studying literary texts. We will explore some of the cultural practices that shape gender roles and gendered identities with particular attention to how literature—poetry, prose, drama, and essays—affects how individuals interpret their own bodies, identities, and relationships as gendered beings. We’ll also consider how gender has shaped who writes and what is written in a given culture. Readings will include Anglophone texts written by both men and women across a variety of time periods, including the present. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 228. (3)
POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE. This course explores definitions of Postcolonialism through literature from places that are not normally canonized in Western literature courses. For example, students might read texts from India, Australia, and Africa as well as from Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Readings will come primarily (but not exclusively) from the twentieth century and cover a variety of genres. Themes that the course investigates include the idea of nationality, the construction of history, categories of race and class, the complexities of cultural inheritance, and problems of narrative transmission. What does it mean to come from a certain place? Who gets to tell the history of a given country? What do governments and national identity have to do with storytelling and art? Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 230. (3)
MULTI-ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE. Through fiction, poetry, drama, and essays, this course explores the literary imaginations of writers who are members of two different cultures and analyzes how these writers express their sense of identity and locate themselves in relation to the dominant culture. The course includes works by Native American, Asian American, and Chicano/a and Latino/a authors. The course covers historical and cultural background materials to help students understand the literary themes and techniques of multi-ethnic writers. Readings emphasize works written since the 1970s renaissance in multi-ethnic literatures in the United States.
ENGLISH 241. (3)
INTRODUCTION TO CINEMA. Drawing on classic through contemporary masterpieces from American and European cinema, this course first teaches students how to read the filmic image and to appreciate film style. It next addresses narrative technique in film, then introduces some critical approaches to understanding film, such as genre and auteur criticism. Finally, the course examines some films in a cultural-studies context. This course does not satisfy the college’s literature requirement. Screenings are held at a time different from the class period. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 243. (3)
THE SHORT NOVEL IN TRANSLATION. This course explores the development of the short novel over two centuries, drawing on multiple global and national traditions. Students can expect to read authors such as Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Mann, Duras, Camus, Garcia Márquez, and Dai Sijie. This comparative literature course also traces literary, philosophical, and political movements across decades and national boundaries. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 244. (3)
THE ART OF THE ESSAY. This course takes a close look at the essay as a literary form that has evolved to meet new political, cultural, and media challenges. Students analyze conventional and experimental essays for technique, content, and social and historical context. This is primarily a literature course concerned with careful reading and discussion of published essays, but students will also have a chance to respond creatively to the primary material. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 245. (3)
SATIRE. An introduction to the tradition of literary satire. The course emphasizes understanding satiric techniques such as irony, parody, caricature, hoaxes, and the creation of a satiric persona. A subsidiary concern is the historical development of the genre from classical literature to the present. Writers to be studied vary, but may include Juvenal, Horace, Butler, Swift, Pope, Voltaire, Blake, Byron, Carlyle, Twain, Bierce, Waugh, Orwell, Vonnegut, and Atwood.
ENGLISH 246. (3)
SCIENCE FICTION. A study of science fiction short stories and novels, exploring how science fiction works as literature and as a genre, as well as the ways in which science fiction both reflects and addresses important social, historical, and cultural issues.
ENGLISH 247. (3)
AMERICAN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS An introduction to the history and interpretation of American comics from their appearance in the Sunday supplements of early twentieth-century newspapers to the flourishing of graphic novels in recent decades. The class will pay attention to the formal, cultural, and the historical contexts of the works. Students may read works from other comics traditions, such as Japanese manga, to appreciate unique American contributions to the form.
ENGLISH 257. (3)
FICTION INTO FILM. An examination of how several notable works of fiction have been adapted for the screen. After beginning with general principles of narrative theory and some general principles of film aesthetics, the course then focuses on the different ways that stories are told in short fiction, novel, and film. The texts included are ones that present some interesting challenges for adaptation from one medium to another, with the films often representing significant departures from the print text. Emphasis is placed on understanding the important differences between print and film media for narrative and narration.
ENGLISH 258. (3)
LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH. This course examines Southern literature with attention to the idea of the “Southern” writer as a geographical, cultural, and historical distinction. Within this broader category, the course explores differences of region, race, class, and gender. Readings include major literary genres (fiction, poetry, drama) as well as other cultural constructions of the South. Prerequisite: none.
ENGLISH 270. (3)
INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE. An introduction to Shakespeare’s language and his major poetic and dramatic works. Texts are grounded in their historical contexts, and particular attention is given to Shakespeare’s use and development of literary forms and themes.
ENGLISH 300. (3)
MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE. A study of Old English and Middle English literature (exclusive of Chaucer), surveying major authors and works, important literary genres, and characteristic human values of the English middle ages. Readings are in modern translation; knowledge of the Old English and Middle English languages is not required.
ENGLISH 301. (3)
LITERATURE OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE. This course examines poetry, plays, and prose produced during Tudor and Stuart eras in England— the English Renaissance. We study the remarkable literary output of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who saw themselves as part of a developing English literary tradition. Authors may include Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Webster. We will consider the place of public writing in the English culture of this period, when debates about self-determination, religion, and the proper exercise of political power were prominent. Students will read and write about secondary criticism pertinent to the literary texts.
ENGLISH 302. (3)
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE. A critical study of the major writers of the eighteenth century, particularly Pope, Swift, and Samuel Johnson, and of the central imaginative concerns of the transition from the Renaissance world view to the Romantic and post-Romantic eras. There is a concentration on satire, but with some attention to drama, the novel, lyric poetry, and miscellaneous prose.
ENGLISH 303. (3)
THE ENGLISH ROMANTICS. The six major Romantics-Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats-are read critically. Primary emphasis is on the poetic vision of each writer, with some attention also to the continuing struggle of “the Romantic imagination.”
ENGLISH 304. (3)
VICTORIAN TRANSFORMATIONS. This course investigates transformations in and of Victorian literature, tracing how texts represent biological, thermodynamic, and ecological change over time. Drawing on nineteenth-century scientific theories as well as recent concepts and methods from ecocriticism, new materialism, and literary formalism, students will explore three vectors of transformation: evolution, energy, and extraction. Through their careful study of poetry, prose, and criticism, students will track how Victorian literature signals and shapes past and present engagements with the material world.
ENGLISH 311. (3)
EPIC WRITING. In this course, the nature of the epic and of episodic storytelling is considered. The course will begin with the Odyssey and include the Epic of Gilgamesh as well as selected texts from the English, American, and broader European traditions. Along the way, a number of questions connected to the epic genre are examined: how epics represent their political and social contexts, how epics establish a fictional world in their opening lines, how this genre uses the episode to isolate and illuminate action or thought, in what ways notions of the heroic evolve as this genre develops in later traditions. The relationship between the epic and different forms of storytelling is also considered-- from oral to early writings to mass produced print to visual media--and how differing media shape narrative conventions.
ENGLISH 314. (3)
MODERN DRAMA. American, British, and European plays since 1880 are read. Playwrights may include Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, O’Neill, Pirandello, Garcia Lorca, Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller.
ENGLISH 317. (3)
THE BRITISH NOVEL IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY. This course traces flashpoints in the British novel’s development and reception across the long nineteenth century (ca. 1789-1914). Carefully attending to both textual form and historical context, students will analyze the narrative techniques and structures of selected novels and consider how those works respond to changing desires and demands in the literary marketplace.
ENGLISH 318. (3)
MODERN BRITISH AND AMERICAN NOVEL. This course explores developments in the novel during the twentieth century, with a focus on Modernism and the earlier decades. Featured authors may include Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Nabokov, followed by a more contemporary author who inherits the Modernist tradition.
ENGLISH 320. (3)
THE SHORT STORY. This course will approach the short story as a separate prose genre and examine what it means to read that genre. Readings will begin with earlier “masters” of the form—Poe, Maupassant, Chekhov—and then survey trends in the modern short story form from the early part of the twentieth century to the present. Other authors in the course may include Joyce, Kafka, Mansfield, Hemingway, Faulkner, Borges, O’Connor, Welty, Carver, and Lahiri. The course will end with a sampling of contemporary stories from current magazines and journals.
ENGLISH 322. (3)
CONTEMPORARY FICTION. Readings are drawn from the work of major novelists writing in English in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. The reading list, which reflects the cultural diversity of highly regarded writers in the contemporary period, evolves as new authors emerge and established figures produce new works of fiction. Innovations in narrative technique are considered in relation to the novels’ thematic content. The course materials explore how experimental techniques associated with postmodernism and metafiction work in conjunction with elements of literary realism.
ENGLISH 323. (3)
CONTEMPORARY POETRY. This course is a study of contemporary English-language poetry and poets from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century, though earlier work may be read to provide appropriate perspective. The reading list, which will aim to represent the wide range of poetry being written in our time, will change as the landscape of contemporary poetry moves and changes. The course will consider not only variations and unities in thematic approaches, but also contemporary form and prosody.
ENGLISH 326. (3)
THE CIVIL WAR AND AMERICAN IDENTITY IN THE 19th CENTURY. This course explores the shifting terrains of American literature in the mid to late nineteenth century as the crisis of the Civil War spurs important questions about national belonging. Among a divided citizenry, American literature joins the debate, goes to battle, and attempts to reconcile. We will analyze how the aims of nineteenth century literary movements—such as Transcendentalism and Regionalism—intersect with the objectives of political rhetoric and create deep impressions on the cultural landscape. This course aims to investigate not only the discourse that surrounded the Civil War in the nineteenth century but the implications of that discourse in how we remember and reimagine the Civil War in the present day.
ENGLISH 334. (3)
SPECIAL TOPICS IN SHAKESPEARE. A thematic consideration of some of Shakespeare’s works in their cultural and literary contexts and an introduction to literary criticism and scholarship in Shakespeare studies. Primary readings may include selections from the long narrative poems, the sonnets, and the tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances.
ENGLISH 335. (3)
MILTON. This course analyzes John Milton’s major works in their intellectual and cultural contexts with attention to recent critics’ approaches. The primary focus is a careful reading of Paradise Lost in full, but Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are also considered. To prepare for the major works, we study Milton’s shorter poems, such as “Lycidas,” and his political prose, such as Areopagitica. Central concerns include how Milton engaged in the political and religious controversies of his time and why his writing continues to generate debate and to move readers. Along with students of English literature, students with interests in religion, classics, government, and English history are encouraged to take this course.
ENGLISH 336. (3)
AUSTEN. A study of Austen’s six novels, juvenilia and selected letters critically considered, focusing on her subject of the growth of the mind and on her style. The question of whether Austen is an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century writer, a classic or a romantic artist, a “revolutionary” or a “conservative” is central, but emphasis is on the fiction, not on the revolutionary period in which she lived.
ENGLISH 337. (3)
DICKENS. A seminar on Dickens’s literary techniques, social themes, and cultural impacts. This course explores Dickens’s contributions not only to the literary marketplace (with particular attention to serialization and adaptation) but also to Victorianera (and later) debates about socioeconomic inequality, industrialization, urbanization, labor, imperialism, gender roles, and modern bureaucracy. Students will read selected major novels as well as some of Dickens’s shorter literary and nonliterary writings; students will also engage with secondary criticism.
ENGLISH 338. (3)
FAULKNER. Readings for this course include at least five of Faulkner’s novels, many short stories, and some Faulkner miscellany, all positioned against the backdrops of Modernism and the American South. The course also includes some shorter works by other 20th-century authors and several critical approaches to this complex and innovative author.
ENGLISH 340. (3)
MORRISON. A study of seven of Morrison’s novels, from The Bluest Eye to Paradise, and selections from her literary criticism, as well as a consideration of criticism written about this Nobel Prize-winning author. Central issues include narrative technique, treatment of race and gender, and the historical/ cultural background of the novels. [English 340 will satisfy the focused perspective requirement for majors, OR the upper-level or free elective requirement.]
ENGLISH 341. (3)
MARK TWAIN. In this course, students study the innovative and influential literary career of Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. They read novels, short stories, and nonfiction by Twain, who was a leader in listening to American voices and talking back to them. Students analyze Twain’s commentary on the late-nineteenth-century American cultural landscape and also explore the effects of Twain’s methodologies and ideas on the writers who followed him. Central issues include satire, realism, and conceptions of race and nationhood. Students read and write about secondary criticism and theory pertinent to Twain’s work, and they investigate why William Faulkner and others have considered Twain to be “the father of American literature.”
ENGLISH 360. (3)
AUTHORSHIP AND THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK. This course examines the ways that literature has been shaped by changes in authorship and changes in textual technologies. Students consider questions such as how authors have been educated, compensated, and represented; the importance of authorship in literary theory; and how literature is affected by the way it is written and read, whether orally, in manuscript, in print, or in electronic form.
ENGLISH 380. (3)
LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM. A study of critical theories, especially of modern trends in criticism, and an introduction to the practice of critical techniques. Offered: fall semester. In the second semester of the junior year or the first semester of the senior year, each major must enroll in English 480, the Capstone Seminar, and take as a corequisite English 481, the Research Methods Seminar.
ENGLISH 480. (3)
CAPSTONE SEMINAR FOR ENGLISH MAJORS. In this course students engage a special topic in English and select individual research topics on which to do guided independent work resulting in a substantial critical research paper. While the class as a whole covers readings relating to the topic of the course, each student is expected to find further primary and secondary texts related to his own work. During the semester each student gives oral presentations, writes brief thought papers and/or summaries of critical works, and produces drafts of his final essay. Corequisite: English 481. Offered: at least once every academic year concurrent with English 481.
ENGLISH 481. (1)
RESEARCH METHODS SEMINAR FOR ENGLISH MAJORS. In this course advanced English majors who are working on their capstone projects develop and strengthen the skills they need for independent research. The syllabus for the course is keyed to the schedule in the 480 course. Tasks and topics include developing an annotated bibliography, honing library skills, adhering to citation formats, and designing oral presentations appropriate to literary studies. Special emphasis is placed on effective use of critical discourse and on writing workshops. Corequisite: English 480. Offered: at least once every academic year concurrent with English 480.
WRITING COURSES
ENGLISH 250. (3)
POETRY WRITING: FORM AND FUNCTION. A workshop and seminar in the craft of writing poetry. Students study a large variety of poets and poems, analyzing the craft and content of the texts, to use as models in the writing of their own poems. Students are expected to produce analytical responses to the reading, study prosody and technique, and produce substantial original work. Prerequisite: none. Offered: fall semester.
ENGLISH 252. (3)
FICTION WRITING: NARRATIVE AND CRAFT. A workshop and seminar in the discipline of writing fiction. Students study the techniques of shortstory writers, such as Anton Chekhov and Eudora Welty, to use as models in the writing of their own stories. Students are expected to produce analytical responses to the reading, study craft and technique, and produce substantial original work. Prerequisite: none. Offered: fall semester.
ENGLISH 350. (3)
POETRY WRITING: VOICE AND PRACTICE. A workshop and seminar in the art of writing poetry in today’s literary and cultural landscape. Classes are a mix of open readings and criticism of student poems, reports on and analysis of reading from the class, and tutorials. Students are asked to compose a chapbook-length portfolio of their own poetry by the end of the semester. Prerequisite: none. Offered: spring semester.
ENGLISH 352. (3)
FICTION WRITING: VOICE AND PRACTICE. A workshop and seminar in the art of writing fiction in today’s literary and cultural landscape. Students move from brief assignments and readings emphasizing the elements of fiction—description, point of view, character, and plot—to the writing of short stories. Students are expected to produce analytical responses to the reading, study craft and technique, and produce significant original work. Prerequisite: none. Offered: spring semester.
updated 7/28/2025