This course introduces you to the Father of English literature – Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was the son of a wine merchant, a servant to three kings, a member of Parliament, and an inspired poet. He also was the first author to write in the English language – and what stories he wrote!
200 Level - appropriate for FY students - Anakin Skywalker. Padmé Amidala. Jin Erso. Han Solo. The names of STAR WARS characters infiltrate modern American culture. But have you thought about what it really means to grow up as a Jedi knight? Or to study at a political academy so that you can become queen by age fourteen? Or, more extreme still, to enlist for military service when you're not yet sixteen?
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?
The accepted authority on the English language, containing the meaning, history, and usage of 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world.
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.
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.
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.