2016-2017

This course explores important intellectual, political, philosophical, legal, economic, social, and religious contexts for the Declaration of Independence. We begin with a consideration of the English Revolution, investigating the texts of the Declaration of Rights of 1689 and Locke’s Second Treatise and their meanings to American revolutionaries. We then consider imperial debates over taxation in the 1760s and 1770s, returning Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography to its original context. Reading Paine’s Common Sense and the letters of Abigail Adams and John Adams we look at the multiple meanings of independence. We study Jefferson’s drafting process, read the Declaration over the shoulders of people on both sides of the Atlantic, and consider clues to contemporary meanings beyond the intentions of Congress. Finally, we briefly engage the post-revolutionary history of the place and meaning of the Declaration in American life. (F)

How do poetry, fiction, and nonfictional prose of the long eighteenth century engage with the pressures of political union in Britain? What are the effects of increasingly dense narrative framing in eighteenth century works of literature? This course asks these questions and ponders the extent to which their answers are intertwined. (B, F)

This course introduces students to the eighteenth-century novel by considering the relative power and vulnerability attributed to readers and writers. Who got to write novels, and what kind of authority was attached to that writing? We’ll look at a number of eighteenth-century texts (novels by Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, and Burney), as well as J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 Foe, a postcolonial rewriting of works by Defoe. (B, F)

A study of the major authors and types of seventeenth-century golden short poetry, with special focus on Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Philips, and Marvell. (C, E, F)

In this course, we’ll be reading some of the most compelling popular literature of the 14th and 15th centuries: chivalric romances. We’ll discuss the strangeness and unexpected insights of a selection of these texts as they take up issues familiar to us today: problems of gender, ethical concern, and religious belief, among others. (C, E)

A survey of key concepts and trends in Western and non-Western theater from the late seventeenth century to the present, the course offers its students tools to understand and interpret dramatic literature and theatrical performance. We will read plays and performances closely, taking into account form, character, plot and genre, but also staging, acting, spectatorship, and historical conventions. In the process we will ask how various agents—playwrights, directors, performers, and audiences—generate plays and give them meaning, and students will become agents themselves by devising and performing scenes as a parallel mode of interpretation. No experience making theater required. Approaches to Theater 1 is not a prerequisite. Either term of the course satisfies the English Department's gateway requirement. (A, D, F, G)

A survey of key concepts and trends in Western and non-Western theater from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance, the course offers its students tools to understand and interpret dramatic literature and theatrical performance. We will read plays and performances closely, taking into account form, character, plot and genre, but also staging, acting, spectatorship, and historical conventions. In the process we will ask how various agents—playwrights, directors, performers, and audiences—generate plays and give them meaning, and students will become agents themselves by devising and performing scenes as a parallel mode of interpretation. No experience making theater required. Either term of the course satisfies the English Department's gateway requirement. (A, D, E)

This Gateway course introduces central aspects of the study of narrative by examining how stories depict violence and justice. We will consider both how language represents experience at the limits of articulation (as in intense pain, cruelty, and death), and we’ll analyze how narrative both constructs and undermines models of just violence and lawful punishment. The course will concentrate especially on literary manipulations of point of view: violence, justice, and narrative are all radically perspectival phenomena. Readings will likely include the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and works by Franz Kafka, Jack London, Shirley Jackson, and J.M. Coetzee. (A, B, G)

This course will trace the historical course of English poetry through one genre, that of elegy. From Ben Jonson to John Milton, from P.B. Shelley to Frank O’Hara, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg to Denise Riley and Thomas Hardy to Gwendolyn Brooks, elegy has been central to English and American lyric. Its formal variations, its changing objects and modes of address, and its historically and culturally situated diction, allow students to experience the transhistorical resonance of poetic practice and a range of writing suitable to an Introduction. (A, C)

This course investigates the long poem or “post-epic” in 20th- and 21st-century North and Latin America. As we test the limits of the term post-epic, we will consider whether it may be applied equally to the heroic tale and the open field poem. How do poets interpret the idea of “the Americas” as lands, nations, and sources of identity in these works, and in what tangled ways do their poetics develop through dialogue across linguistic and geographical distances? Authors may include Pablo Neruda, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Vicente Huidobro, Aimé Césaire, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Anne Carson, Lisa Robertson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Urayoán Noel, and Jennifer Tamayo. Undergraduate: (C,G) Graduate: (20th/21st)