English
Queer Feelings
Appropriate for FY students- Is it high time we lean into our unpleasant feelings: exhaustion, loneliness, shame, melancholy, anxiety? Can interrogating our feelings help us better know, even see through, the world as it exists? How do we navigate society, relationships, our own selves with and against feelings? In turn, how might understanding ourselves as entities of feeling first and foremost - as the locus of desires, energies, and reactions - free us from traditional categories of identity and being?
Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
The accepted authority on the English language, containing the meaning, history, and usage of 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world.
American Romanticism
LT: American Romanticism: 1830-1860. In this course students will embark on a wild ride through the canon of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. During this literary odyssey, we'll explore both land and sea in the company of several great American writers: Cooper, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson.
Post-Colonial Film, Literature and Theory
Throughout the mid- to late-twentieth century, formerly colonized people from around the world gained independence and established new nations. It meant the end of a particular form of oppression but also the enormous challenge of producing new cultural norms, governance, social relations, and intellectual habits. Decolonization gave as much rise to civil wars and coup d’états as to a rich body of art that imagines unseen possibilities while registering the realities of intergenerational trauma, survival, and diaspora.
Projects for Seniors
Student-initiated projects involving significant study and writing carried out through frequent conferences with a faculty sponsor. These projects are completed in addition to the five courses required for the advanced level of the major. Prerequisites: senior standing, a 3.25 GPA in English, and approval by the departmental Honors/Independent Projects committee. Proposals for fall projects must be submitted to the committee by March 1 of the semester preceding the beginning of fall projects, and by November 1 of the semester preceding the beginning of spring projects.
British Romanticism
The Industrial Revolution. The French Revolution. Abolition. World exploration. The British Romantic period saw huge paradigm shifts in ideas about human rights, the natural world, and what it meant to be “English.” This period also saw a set of intellectual and aesthetic revolutions that resulted in a nearly complete overturning of what were considered the aims of “good” poetry and fiction.
Methods of Critical Analysis: Shaking Up Shakespeare
This course introduces students to a range of theoretical methodologies used by creative writers and literary scholars. While each section of the course may focus on a different theme or on a different group of primary texts, all sections encourage students to learn and to apply a variety of methods with the goal of crafting critical analyses of literature.
Introduction to Poetry
Does poetry tend to baffle you, although you know there’s something enticing about it that you’d like to understand better? Or have you enjoyed poetry before and would like to learn more about it? This is the course for you. We will explore many of the ways poets make art out of language, including the visual vistas, soundscapes, and mind-opening ideas that poems can give to their readers. Occasionally we’ll try out some of their creative techniques ourselves, but our consistent focus will be on appreciation and enjoyment.