132 courses with the subject ENGL BC, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ENGL BC1021FEMINIST LIFE WRITING3.00
Feminists have famously claimed that "the personal is political." Accordingly, life writing--in various genres--has been an important form for feminists across generations. In this class, we will explore the different ways in which feminists have used these modes to create visions of the self, to challenge the roles and self-images given to them, and to imagine new narratives. In particular, we'll explore questions of genre: so many of these writers have developed hybrid genres or challenged the boundaries of genre in order to write their lives. Looking at examples of life writing including letters, diaries and journals, graphic memoirs, and "traditional" autobiographies, we will examine these forms through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability. Readings are subject to change, but may include: Audre Lorde, Zami; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts; Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior; poems by Adrienne Rich; Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; Janet Mock, Redefining Realness, and selected shorter pieces. Additionally, we will read critical and theoretical works that will urge us to consider our primary texts from various critical approaches: including sexuality studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and transgender studies
This seminar will read stories of love gone bad, of romances that end catastrophically, that damage lovers or leave victims along the way. We will illuminate the consuming fantasy of the romance genre in its quest for "true love," as well as a range of emotions – rage and revenge, narcissism and self-protection, obsession and oblivion – that surface in its wake. We will also look at shifting interpretations of "bad love," from Plato, to the Galenic theory of the humors, to the sociology of court-culture, to Freudian and finally contemporary neurobiological explanations of feelings. Students are welcome to propose texts of their own interests to open this course to the widest range of interests. In addition to seminar discussion, there will be weekly individual tutorials with Professor Hamilton as well as interviews with a neurobiologist and a psychologist
Reproduction is both a biological and social process—one that is often the target of deep-seated ideas about identity, culture, science, and technology. How have contraceptives, pharmaceuticals, and other technologies shaped reproductive experiences? What does the use and distribution of these scientific innovations reveal about existing power structures and social stratification? What liberatory possibilities do these technologies enable, and what are their limitations? Course material will center work by reproductive justice scholar-activists and feminist science and technology studies scholarship, including work by Dorothy Roberts, Alexandra Stern, Emily Martin, Alondra Nelson, and others
What are ghosts? Why are we haunted by them? And why are we so drawn to telling stories about these hauntings? In this class, we will read ghost stories from the 17th century through the present day; in the process, we will examine what these stories reveal about our own preoccupations, fears, and desires. Writers and readers turn to ghost stories for horror and suspense, for sure, but also because they’re a powerful medium for reckoning with history and memory—with the past’s hold over the present—particularly when it comes to violence, loss, oppression, and trauma. Ghost stories engage with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; with social otherness; with marginalization. Ghost stories stage problems of justice, vengeance, and guilt. Ghost stories trouble the nature of the body, and the meaning of (and boundaries between) life and death. Ghost stories lend themselves both to fear and to laughter, both to questions and to answers. While exploring all of these topics and themes, we will also consider the trope of storytelling itself, which figures prominently in so many works of the genre. What is wrapped up in the gesture of telling a story, and in the ways, contexts, and reasons in and for which these stories get told? Readings (subject to change) include works by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Helen Oyeyemi, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and others
Over the centuries, readers have been drawn to accounts of “true” crime—violent narratives involving real people and real events. And yet, as with any literary object, the notion of “truth” is always unstable—stories and their tellings are always shaped by the motivations, values, and choices of those who tell them, often with an eye toward the audience that will consume them. Whether constructed in order to moralize, to enforce or critique social or political ideologies, or purely to sell copies, “true crime” is a literary genre that reveals attitudes about gender, race, and class; that illustrates—and sometimes calls into question—cultural norms and mores; that calls on readers to reflect on their own morbid curiosity and assumptions and fears. In this class we will engage with a diverse selection of literary texts—spanning from the Middle Ages to the present day and from a range of genres, including pamphlets, plays, novels, and more—as well as contemporary films, a tv series, and a podcast. Through close reading and critical analysis, we will examine the evolution of the “true crime” genre and the cultural and societal contexts that shape the portrayal of crime for popular consumption. We will explore the ways in which texts and authors sensationalize, moralize, and convey the complexities of crime. We will analyze point of view: who’s telling the story, whom we sympathize with, and what insights we get into the minds of those committing crimes as well as those who fall prey to them. We will consider justice and policing— the role played by the law and its enforcers in shaping narratives about crime and punishment, right and wrong. Finally, we will reflect on the ethical implications of representing real-life crimes in literature, and how “true crime” narratives shape social perceptions, fears, prejudices, and notions of justice and morality
The internet and digital technologies have profoundly impacted the way that comics and graphic novels are produced, distributed, and read because they no longer need to be produced and printed on paper and distributed to readers in that medium. A related development in this technological revolution is the emergence and proliferation of webcomics, a type of comic that has allowed creators to avoid having to rely on publishers for distribution and marketing. As Sean Kleefeld (2020) points out, webcomics differ from those digital comics and graphic novels which use the internet only as a means of distribution. For webcomics the creator’s intention lies at the root of this distinction as a webcomic’s creator intends for the web to be the only means of distribution. In addition, webcomics differ technologically, as they do not require proprietary software for reading. This course examines the webcomics revolution in a multifaceted way in order to understand how the internet and related technologies have allowed creators to produce and distribute comic narratives that address subjects neglected by the print and digital publishing industry. Because of webcomics absolute reliance on digital technologies for production and distribution, this course will consider those technologies as part of our investigation into what makes webcomics distinct from traditional print comics and graphic novels. As part of this investigation, we will look at how webcomics are built and distributed. We will therefore think about the ways that reading webcomics on a computer screen or smartphone differs from the experience of reading a printed comic or graphic novel. This will lead to a consideration of why webcomics are distributed in a single-page format as opposed to print and digital comics and graphic novels that can comprise hundreds of pages. We’ll think about how webcomic creators’ use of the single page as the smallest unit of information is not only connected to the production process but is also part of the need to use search engines and social media to help readers find and access the webcomics. To enhance these topical explorations, students will make webcomics and webpages to host them, in order to gain a practical as well as conceptual understanding. As the class considers these topics, the course readings will include selections from some of the most prominent webcomics in recent years. These selections have been chosen to represent a range of genres and page formats in order to allow students to consider how distribution via the internet has allowed proliferation of some genres that are otherwise poorly served by publishers of print and digital comics and graphic novels. Students in the course will read Jeph Jacques’s Questionable Content, Rebecca Cohen’s Gyno-Star, Tak’s Empathize This, Keith Knight’s The K Chronicles, and Kylie Summer Wu’s Trans Girl Next Door among others
This course explores representations of forced and voluntary migration through a selection of global literary texts and films. Examining novels, short stories, and films, the course will ask students to reflect on how aesthetic representations of exile complicate notions of home, belonging, sovereignty, and identity. Beginning with the birth of the modern refugee after World War II, with its legal and political consolidation by the UN 1951 Refugee Convention, we will discuss several dimensions of displacement and the ways in which these are differently experienced by individuals. We will move from scenes of interminable bureaucratic stasis in post-war Europe to depictions of border crossings along the Mexico-US border, will hear the voices of Iranian women alongside those of Vietnamese American writers working to articulate complex identities, and much more. While examining this constellation of diverse materials, we will attend both to the historical and political specificity of each as well as to productive points of convergence that they share by asking: What do we understand to be the possibilities and limitations of art in portraying the experience of refugees, exiles, and migrants? How has exile become one of the central metaphors of modernity, and what does this universalism bring to the fore and elide? How can aesthetic representation challenge popular depictions of refugees as innocent supplicants in need of empathy and instead refigure them as political actors? How do these complicated texts reinforce and contest narratives that depict forced migration as a linear movement from unstable peripheries to stable centers?
Poetry-ish is a class examining how poetry speaks to, merges with, or embeds itself in other genres in order to make a multimedia social statement. We will look at the intersections between craft and criticism, audience and experimentation, history and self-expression. Readings will move from early examples of hybridity to postmodern experimentation to creative examinations into such contemporary issues as climate change, A.I., and the structural racism that inspired Black Lives Matter. Genres include legal treaties, programming code, comics, cinema, opera, jazz, and of course, poetry. Students will be asked to write three short essays, take turns leading class discussion, submit one longer research-based project, and engage in various creative and critical writing exercises throughout the semester. Planned authors include Layli Long Soldier, William Blake, Franny Choi, JP Howard, Vanessa Anglica Villarreal, Douglas Kearney, Daveed Diggs, and Langston Hughes
ENGL BC1246INTIMATE COMPANIONS: READING AND WRITING ABOUT BOTANICALS, ANIMALS, AND PEOPLE3.00
This First-Year course will engage with literary expressions of the universally interesting topic of relationships. Tony Tanner in his Adultery in the Novel characterizes marriage as “the structure which supports all structure.” Contemporary critics have seen marriage as essential to maintaining the “family values” of the bourgeoisie; feminists and Marxists have challenged the economic assumptions of patriarchally-defined marriage. Folklorists have treated marriage as the endpoint of the search for a safe domestic space. We will touch on this subject, but will also turn to writing about other indispensable relationships that, increasingly, fill our lives. Animals and botanicals—and our relationship with nature—have become so obviously Important in the past ten years that they deserve to underpin our core values, too. Starting with classic fairy tales and moving on to short fictions, contemporary American poetry, an affectionate study of the psyches of trees, and brief essays on animals we live with, this course will deliver an exportable cluster of ideas that may change our lives
ENGL BC1249AI LITERACY IN PRACTICE: FROM UNDERSTANDING TO RESPONSIBLE APPLICATION3.00
"I believe in the future of AI changing the world. The question is, who is changing AI? It is really important to bring diverse groups of students and future leaders into the development of AI.” --Fei-Fei Li, Professor, Denning Co-Director Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI Increasing numbers of AI experts and researchers emphasize the urgent need for college students to develop AI literacy, preparing them for evolving job markets, fostering ethical awareness, and ensuring equitable participation in an AI-driven society. To help them achieve AI literacy, this introductory-level course teaches students how to ethically and effectively use Generative AI (GAI) by exploring how GAI works, how to use it properly, and how to critically evaluate its output. Students will understand AI model functionality, distinguish GAI from traditional AI, examine issues of originality, authorship, intellectual property, copyright, plagiarism, fair use, accuracy, bias, environmental impacts, and privacy - all while developing meta-awareness about how AI simulates certain aspects of human creativity and cognition The course's placement in Barnard's English Department reflects the recognition that AI's development requires interdisciplinary perspectives beyond STEM, as AI research increasingly intersects with humanities and social sciences to address ethical, social, and cultural implications. Through ethics-focused assignments and writing projects culminating in a final research investigation in students' chosen fields, this course empowers students to resist pure AI reliance and actively control these technologies rather than remaining passive observers of AI's expanding influence in academia and society
ENGL BC1295GRAPHIC NOVEL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND BIOGRAPHIES3.00
This course explores the generative intersection of text and image in graphic novel autobiographies and biographies, offering students an introduction to literary analysis through one of today's most innovative storytelling forms. Autobiographical and biographical graphic narratives are perhaps the best known and most widely read graphic literary texts, combining words and hand-drawn images to create powerful accounts of personal experience, historical events, trauma, memory, and identity formation. Course readings consist of classic works in the genre—Maus (Spiegelman), Fun Home (Bechdel), and Persepolis (Satrapi)—alongside more recent texts—They Called Us Enemy (Takei), Baddawi (Abdelrazaq), and The Best We Could Do (Bui). This diverse reading list will expose students to varied artistic styles, narrative approaches, and cultural perspectives, providing a foundation for understanding how graphic storytelling operates across different contexts. The inherent subjectivity of hand-drawn images, as well as the limitations of memory and post-memory, raise important questions about the authority and authenticity of these narratives. By closely analyzing these texts, students will consider how creators have used the medium's unique affordances and what strategies they employ to address its limitations when depicting lived, historical experiences. Class discussions will be supplemented by relevant academic scholarship and contextual materials that creators drew upon in producing their work. Course assignments will consist of short writing assignments, analysis essays, and a creative zine project in which students craft their own personal graphic narratives. The analytical assignments are designed to help students develop multiple competencies: critical analysis skills, visual literacy, and creative expression, while the zine project offers students a hands-on opportunity to experiment with the graphic narrative form, deepening their understanding of how meaning emerges from the interplay of text and image. No prior experience studying graphic novels is required. Graphic Novel Autobiographies and Biographies fulfills Barnard's Arts/Humanities Foundation requirement
This history of children’s literary narrative begins with the observation that the stories read and heard by children exercise immeasurable imaginative power. Socially, ethically, culturally, psychologically, even politically, much of who we are as adults –what makes us cry and what makes us laugh-- began in the first stories that absorbed us and gave us so much pleasure. Beginning with fairytales and folktales from across the globe, we will explore coming-of-age stories, domestic fiction designed to educate girls, adventure romance marketed to boys (and to men who thought of themselves as boys) and fantasy. We will look at how children’s literature explores questions of heroism, gender difference, disability, perspective, community, and resilience. We will consider narrative strategies such as setting, voice, and plot as well as the role of historical context, illustration and media adaptation. While our discussions will focus on fictional primary sources, we will also consider scholarship that helps see this material through a variety of theoretical perspectives. Readings may include fairytale selections from Europe, Asia, and Africa; Alcott’s Little Women and its American afterlife in Gerwig’s film; Stevenson’s Treasure Island and pirate narrative; Collodi’s and Disney’s Pinocchio; Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and quest romance; Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; and a selection of illustrated picture books
In this generative workshop, we will study a variety of comedic forms and styles including satire, parody, sketch and joke writing. We’ll think about how comedy comes simply from finding the fun in story we want to tell. We take our fun seriously, thinking about how comedy can be used to challenge constructs of identity and power. How can humor be illuminating? How can humor be feminist? How can humor be intersectional? How can humor help us tell the hard truths? Can we laugh at oppression without laughing it off? The fun of the story is sometimes a good joke, sometimes it’s simply that we’ve lived to tell. Coursework will include in-class writing exercises and short pieces through which students will develop a research question that they will work into a final research presentation
ENGL BC1808ROOTING FOR THE ANTIHERO – THE EVOLUTION OF A MODERN ARCHETYPE3.00
How exhausting is it, really, always rooting for the antihero? Not very, our cultural and social landscape would suggest. From films to novels, popstars to political figures, contemporary culture marvels more and more at the misfits, the flawed, the scheming, the petty, the brats. Traditional heroic qualities are no longer necessary to appeal to audiences fascinated with the likes of Tony Soprano or Olivia Pope, the Punisher or Hannah Horvath. But is the antihero a product of the golden age of television? A result of our modern, revisionist impulse to reconsider the villains of our childhood? This course will explore the complex and evolving figure of the antihero from its origins in the literary canon—in, for instance, Greek tragedy and the picaresque novel—to its prominence in modern fiction, film, and television. In parallel, we will explore how the antihero functions within broader socio-political contexts—whether as a critique of institutional power, a commentary on individualism and alienation, or a reflection of our anxieties about a world in which morality is no longer absolute. Key questions will include: What does it mean to be anti-heroic in the modern world? How does the antihero challenge the distinction between protagonist and antagonist? How do marginalized voices shape and redefine antiheroic figures? What is it about figures who live on the boundary between law and lawlessness—the cowboy, the vigilante, the rebel—that so appeals to us?
ENGL BC1901INTRODUCTION TO COMICS ＆ GRAPHIC NOVELS3.00
This course provides students with an introduction to the scholarly study of comics and graphic novels. It is designed to teach students how to analyze these texts by paying special attention to narrative forms and page design. As part of this focus, attention will be given to the way that comics and graphic novels are created and the importance of publication format. In addition to studying comics and graphic novels themselves, we will look at the way that scholars have approached this emergent field of academic interest
An introduction to race, gender, indigeneity, colonialism and class in American fiction from the 18th to the mid-20th century. Writers include Rowson, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Dunbar, James, Zitkala-Sa, Wharton, Faulkner, and Brooks
The English Conference: The Lucyle Hook Guest Lectureship is a two to four-week course each semester on a special topic presented by a visiting scholar. The series was endowed by a gift from Professor Emerita of English Lucyle Hook to bring our students and faculty the perspective of scholars of literature in English working outside the College community. It can only be taken for pass/fail for 1 point. Students must attend all four class sessions and write a final paper in order to receive credit for this course.To see the dates/times that The English Conference will meet this semester, the current course description, and the biography of the visiting scholar, please visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/english-conference
Prerequisites: Application process and permission of instructor. Does not count for major credit. Enrollment limited to Barnard students. Application process and permission of instructor required: https://writing.barnard.edu/become-writing-fellow. Exploration of theory and practice in the teaching of writing, designed for students who plan to become Writing Fellows at Barnard. Students will read current theory and consider current research in the writing process and engage in practical applications in the classroom or in tutoring. The Writer’s Process is only open to those who applied to and were accepted into the Writing Fellows Program. Note: This course now counts as an elective for the English major
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 8 students. Nomination and instructor's permission required. This course is designed for Barnard students in their second or third year who are seeking more practice with academic writing skills. In a small, supportive group, we will break down the core reading, writing, revision, and critical thinking skills that produce strong academic writing, no matter the discipline. You will get to know yourself deeply as a writer: when you get a writing assignment, what does your writing process look like -- how do you get started? When do you resist writing, and why? What do you do when you get stuck -- not only so you can get that paper done, but so you can learn from the process, too? Please note that in addition to the weekly seminar and regular one-on-one meetings with the instructor, students are also required to meet with an assigned Writing Fellow for one hour every other week (Writing Fellows will be assigned and meetings scheduled at the beginning of the semester). This course is only offered P/D/F. Instructor permission is required; to be considered for the course, please fill out this brief questionnaire
Prerequisites: Can count towards major. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class. NOTE: Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class. Fall 2022 course description: Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays. Summer 2022 course description: The Art of the Essay is a writing workshop designed to help you contribute meaningfully in public discourse about the issues that matter most to you. You will write three types of essays in this class, all of which will center personal experience as valuable evidence of larger phenomena or patterns. Your essays will build in complexity, as you introduce more types of sources into conversation about your topics as the semester goes on. You will hone your skills of observing, describing, questioning, analyzing, and persuading. You will be challenged to confront complications and to craft nuanced explorations of your topics. We will also regularly read and discuss the work of contemporary published essayists, identifying key writerly moves that you may adapt as you attempt your own essays. You will have many opportunities throughout the semester to brainstorm ideas, receive feedback from me and your peers, and develop and revise your drafts. At the end of the semester, you will choose a publication to which to submit or pitch one or more of your essays
Prerequisites: Can count towards major. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class. Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays
Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website.. Practice in writing short stories and autobiographical narrative with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours. Please note that only 30 applications will be accepted for Professor Jhumpa Lahiri's Fall 2026 section of Fiction ＆ Personal Narrative. Applications are accepted via this form, starting April 13th
Prerequisites: Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply to the course. Please send a writing sample of up to 5 pages of prose (double spaced) to awatson@barnard.edu. Spring 2026: Fiction and Personal Narrative: Crafting the Narrative "I" In this workshop, we will practice taking creative risks, writing fiction and nonfiction. We will examine four key craft areas: voice, characterization, imagery, and arrangement, both in contemporary published writing and in the writing of the people in this class. In small and large group workshops, we will consider each writer’s work with care and attention to the writer’s vision. By discussing each work-in-progress on its own terms, we will help our fellow writers deepen the meaning and impact of their work. Through risk-taking, and building a creative community, we will also grow and deepen our personal relationships to craft. Model readings will be contemporary short stories or personal essays, mostly written in the first person, including work by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Tony Tulathimutte, K-Ming Chang, Cleyvis Natera, Melissa Febos, Ling Ma, and Deesha Philyaw
Prerequisites: Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website. Practice in writing short stories and other forms of fiction with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours
Prerequisites: Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. The most exciting, and the most terrifying, aspect of writing fiction is that there are no rules that cannot, under certain conditions, be broken. Good fiction makes and lives by its own rules. In this course, we will discuss common tenets of fiction writing—regarding character, plot, point-of-view, and more—and also examine cases in which writers break rules for the better. This course involves attentive reading of stories by various authors, discussions of craft, in-class writing, and workshops of student fiction. Readings may include Shirley Hazzard, Elias Khoury, James Wood, Elena Ferrante, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among others
Prerequisites: Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website.. Varied assignments in poetry designed to explore the resources of language through imitation, allusion, free association, revision, and other techniques. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours
Prerequisites: Open only to juniors and seniors. Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website. The class will explore a broad range of approaches to playwriting in a workshop setting. Classes will largely be spent reading and discussing students’ work. Students will also be choosing from a wide selection of plays to read each week. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours
Prerequisites: Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. What makes a play alive? Often a playwright is surprised into their strongest work. The practices of experimentation and analysis, curiosity and audacity lead to new possibilities. Students will read and respond to plays, identifying elements and strategies, and each week bring in fragments and scenes written in response to weekly prompts. By the middle of the semester, students will choose the piece that feels the most viable and develop it into what in most cases will be a thirty page play. NOTE: Playwriting I (ENGL BC3113) is NOT a prerequisite, and students need not have written a play before
Prerequisites: Some experience in the writing of fiction. Conference hours to be arranged. Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website. An advanced workshop in prose writing, with emphasis on the short story. Some experience in the writing of fiction is required. Students will share at least two pieces of their own work with the class over the course of the semester. In addition, each week we will read and analyze a variety of published short stories. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours
Prerequisites: Some experience in writing of fiction. Conference hours to be arranged. Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Spring 2026Story Writing II is an advanced workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story. Some experience in the writing of fiction is required. Each week we will read and analyze a variety of published short stories with an eye for craft and authorial decisions that might be applied to our own work. Writers we will read may include: Jean Stafford, Yiyun Li, Bryan Washington, Garth Greenwell, Lorrie Moore, Jamel Brinkley, Ling Ma, Cesar Aira, Mavis Gallant, and more. Exercises and in-depth workshop letters will push students to think more deeply about their own choices and the many layers that make up each work. Conference hours to be arranged
Prerequisites: Previous experience or introductory class required. Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website. Assignments designed to examine form and structure in fiction. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours
Prerequisites: Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website. Weekly workshops designed to generate and critique new poetry. Readings in traditional and contemporary poetry will be included. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours
Open only to undergraduates. This course will introduce you to principles of effective public speaking and debate, and provide practical opportunities to use these principles in structured speaking situations. You will craft and deliver speeches, engage in debates and panel discussions, analyze historical and contemporary speakers, and reflect on your own speeches and those of your classmates. You will explore and practice different rhetorical strategies with an emphasis on information, persuasion and argumentation. For each speaking assignment, you will go through the speech-making process, from audience analysis, purpose and organization, to considerations of style and delivery. The key criteria in this course are content, organization, and adaptation to the audience and purpose. While this is primarily a performance course, you will be expected to participate extensively as a listener and critic, as well as a speaker
ENGL BC3123RHETORICAL CHOICES: PUBLIC SPEAKING4.00
Prerequisites: Application process and permission of instructor. Does not count for major credit. Enrollment restricted to Barnard students. Enrollment restricted to Barnard students. Application process and instructor permission required: https://speaking.barnard.edu/become-speaking-fellow. Speaking involves a series of rhetorical choices regarding vocal presentation, argument construction, and physical affect that, whether made consciously or by default, project information about the identity of the speaker. In this course students will relate theory to practice: to learn principles of public speaking and speech criticism for the purpose of applying these principles as peer tutors in the Speaking Fellow Program. Note: This course now counts as an elective for the English major
Prerequisites: Writing sample required to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. In this workshop, we will explore poetry writing as the pursuit and expression of a liberatory language– the language of our highest attention and freedom– shared between reader and writer, and consider the metaphysics and motivations for making meaning and making it our own. In addition to workshops, we will alternate between classes centered on formal and thematic explorations with others focusing on contemplative practices and our writing process. Readings will range diversely through eras and modes including works, among others, by Sun Buer, Audre Lorde, Hannah Emerson, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Mónica de la Torre
ENGL BC3130THE AMERICAN COWBOY AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE WEST3.00
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 14 students. This entertaining and edifying lecture-not-unmixed-with conversation course will consider the icon of the American cowboy, with its signature embrace of masculinity, stoicism, elegiac music, and identification with nature. We will read Cormac McCarthy’s dazzling Border Trilogy and other works that emerge from this icon, watch a curated series of cowboy movies, and write critical essays
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. Writing sample and application required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found under Applying to Creative Writing Courses on the English Department website. In this course we will explore various genres of creative non-fiction and practice a range of craft techniques, paying special attention to the construction of the writing self and the ethics of writing about real people and events. For a more detailed, instructor-specific description, please see our Course Offerings packet. If you are a Columbia student, please note that you will need to submit an access request to view the document containing instructor-specific course descriptions. All requests will be approved within 24 business hours
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 25 students. A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Autumn: Beowulf through Johnson
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 25 students. A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Spring: Romantic poets through the present
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Post-bacc students require instructor permission. Narrative competence is a crucial dimension of health-care delivery; this includes the capacity to attend and respond to stories of illness and the narrative skills to reflect critically on the scene of care and its contexts. Narrative Medicine explores and builds the clinical applications of literary knowledge. The objectives of this foundations course include furthering close reading skills and exploring theories of self-telling and relationality. At the center of this project is the medical encounter. To help clinicians fulfill their "receiving" duties more effectively, we will turn to narrative theory, autobiography theory, psychoanalytic theory, trauma scholarship and witnessing literature. Classwork integrates didactic and experiential methodologies to develop a heightenedawareness of self and others, and to build a practical set of narrative competencies. Readings will include works by Toni Morrison, W.G. Sebald, Lucy Grealy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alison Bechdel, Maggie Nelson, Judith Butler, Arthur Frank, Paul Ricoeur, Jonathan Shay and Jens Brockmeier
ENGL BC3150INVENTION, REVISION, AND IMAGINATION3.00
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. A creative writing workshop in fiction, devoted to the imaginative process, and most specifically, to the arts of invention and revision. In addition to considering the wellspring of creative ideas themselves, students will write stories in a variety of lengths—moderate, long, and as short-shorts. Through this process, apprentice writers will become intimate with the most essential aspect of creating imaginative work: the dedication to seeing one’s ideas morph and grow over time
ENGL BC3151Bad Feelings: The Uses of Literature in Difficult Times4
This course will explore the purposes of literary study--and, by extension, humanistic education--during periods of turmoil. Working in sustained dialogue with one another, we will explore the treatment of emotions such as despair, anxiety, loss, fury & ecstasy in a wide variety of literary texts, ranging from literature that is ancient (e.g., Sophocles, Euripides) to early modern (William Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish) to modern (Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Elena Ferrante). In the process, we will explore various schools of critical theory, such as Aristotle’s Poetics (including the ancient theory of catharsis), psychoanalysis, and feminism, in a context where the stakes of these intellectual traditions will come to the fore.
ENGL BC3153SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS: AN EXPERIMENT IN SLOW READING3.00
This class is: An introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and a chance to read through them all, slowly and carefully An introduction to the way that Shakespeare’s mind worked, and to what he did with words An introduction to the sonnet as a form, up to the present moment A chance to explore how and why we read, and the difference that the pace of our reading makes An opportunity to practice paying a particular kind of extended attention, and to explore what it does to our minds and our memories when we spend time with a body of poems over a series of weeks
Chaucer's innovations with major medieval forms: lyric, the extraordinary dream visions, and the culmination of medieval romance, Troilus and Criseyde. Approaches through close analysis, and feminist and historicist interpretation. Background readings in medieval life and culture.
Chaucer as inheritor of late-antique and medieval conventions and founder of early modern literature and the fiction of character. Selections from related medieval texts. Spring 2026: ENGL BC3155 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ENGL 3155 001/00178 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm 202 Milbank Hall Eugene Petracca 3.00 15/35
Geoffrey Chaucer, “the father of English literature,” was also the first known English reader of Dante – generally regarded as the greatest poet in a modern European language – and the question of how to respond to the legacy of his powerful predecessor left its mark on many of Chaucer’s works. Was “Chaucer,” the self-identified hero of The Canterbury Tales, based on “Dante,” the poet pilgrim who, in the Commedia, claims to have personally visited Hell, Purgatory and Paradise? And if so, as seems likely, what do we make of Chaucer’s rejection of Dante’s “beautiful style,” and his comparative emphasis on irony, incompleteness, and bodily humor? Reading these foundational authors side-by-side sheds unexpected light on each. Could it be that Chaucer was Dante’s canniest reader? In this seminar we will read generous extracts from Chaucer in the original Middle English, as well as the Commedia of Dante, and additional short texts, in modern English translation
ENGL BC3158Medieval Literature: Literatures of Medieval Britain3
BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA)., BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). It's easy to forget that medieval literature wasn't always old and "quaint" as it seems to many of us today. For writers and artists of that era, they were modern, too. But they also imagined their own past and (like many of us) they often had a nostalgic yearning for that lost time. This course will explore a number of forms of medieval literature, mostly British but also some continental, as it explores versions of its past, and especially the ultimately tragic story of King Arthur. We will read across many medieval genres, including some little known today, like lives of saints. But the course will focus on narratives of quest: heroic, psychological, and erotic. We will also explore some of the often beautiful medieval manuscripts in which these texts were often copied. We will read most Middle English texts in the original language; we'll study French and Latin texts in translation.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Renaissance colloquium we will examine English and European imaginative and intellectual life from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Defined by humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and revolution, this was a period of ideological struggle on many levels. Long-held ways of ordering the world came under increasing strain-and sometimes ruptured irreparably. Writers discussed and debated the aims of human knowledge, retooled old literary forms for new purposes, scrambled to take account of an expanded awareness of the globe, and probed the tension between belief and doubt. Throughout this process, they experimented with new literary styles to express their rapidly changing worldviews. This is an intensive course in which we will take multiple approaches to a variety of authors that may include Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Castiglione, More, Rabelais, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Behn, among others
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Enlightenment colloquium we will look at English and European imaginative and intellectual life during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, writers tried in new ways to reconcile the tensions between reason and religion. Categories of thought that underlie our world today were taking shape: secularity, progress, the public and the private, individual rights, religious tolerance. Writers articulated principles of equality in an era of slavery. Literary forms like the novel, which emerges into prominence during this period, express in irreducibly complex ways these and other changes. In this intensive course, we will study from multiple angles a variety of authors that may include Hobbes, Dryden, Locke, Spinoza, Lafayette, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Voltaire, Fielding, Johnson, Diderot, Sterne, and Wollstonecraft, among others
Love dominates, according to received opinion, the literature of the Middle Ages, a period that indeed saw the emergence of courtly romance and Troubadour poetry. But medieval love literature is not all brave knights pining for haughty ladies. Love, for medieval writers, could be sacred or transgressive, irrational or philosophical, transcendent or debasing – and often it was several of these things at once. On the other hand, in a time when everything claims to be about love, one may sometimes be tempted to wonder if nothing is, and the topic certainly provided a space for medieval writers to explore a number of related themes such as gender, class, cultural difference, nature, and truth. In this course we will consider a selection of these rich and paradoxical texts, as we read in a variety of genres by authors across Europe including but not limited to: Abelard and Heloise, Ibn Hazm, Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Christine de Pisan
ENGL BC3162DONNE, THE METAPHYSICALS, AND HIS LEGACY3.00
John Donne is the most famous “Metaphysical Poet” of the 17th century. The term “metaphysical” to refer to his poetry was first used by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. It was popularized in the 20th century by T. S. Eliot, who lamented what he called a “dissociation of sensibility” that set in during the 17th century, whereas (Eliot said) “a thought to Donne was an experience,” as if mind was not simply a separate thing from embodied experience. Donne’s poetry has long been admired, indeed loved, embraced by later readers, writers, and artists—not just in England and America but in different parts of the world. He has left a rich legacy, and what Judith Scherer Herz calls his “voiceprint” on diverse later writers. In my experience, students always want to spend more time on Donne. In this course, we will do that, reading his poetry with attention but also his prose Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, written in 1623 during the plague when he came close to dying. The Devotions found a new life during the AIDs crisis, and then again during our Covid pandemic. The line from the Devotions that begins “No man is an island” has been part of our culture for a century, though many have no idea where it comes from. In this course, we will engage in “attentive,” patient reading of his texts, entering in them, trying to figuring them out, much as Donne sought to figure out lived experience in richly metaphorical writing. Though Donne is at the center of the course, we will also read a selection of poems by other 17th-century Metaphysical poets—George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell—and Sir Thomas Browne’s prose Hydriotaphia: Or Urn Burial, occasioned by the excavation of ancient burial urns discovered in Norwich. Browne tries to figure out the identity of these urns, then moves to a fascinating survey of the burial practices of different cultures over a long period of time, and then concludes with a profound meditation on memory, legacy, and our desire for immortality, perpetuating our earthly connections. Donne left an impression on so many writers such as Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney; Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich; Djuna Barnes (her novel Nightwood, a lesbian classic), Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht, the Bengali Rabinadrath Tagore; Joseph Brodsky, Yehudah Amichai and Leonard Cohen; Linda Gregerson, and Kimberly Johnson. So many possibilities for anyone interested in exploring beyond the limits of syllabus. Donne’s poetry has had (and continues to have) a transhistorical and transcultural currency. This course begins to opening up possibilities, as we think about how and why we read imaginative literature from the past
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students. A critical and historical introduction to Shakespeares comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163: Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164: Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students. Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students. Critical and historical introduction to selected comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances by Shakespeare. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163: Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164: Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order
The seventeenth century was a century of revolution, giving birth to modern ways of thinking, and calling into question many of the old ways. In the early years, many were affected by melancholy, some believing the world was approaching the endtimes. England experienced plagues, particularly in London, and other catastrophes. So we might find some affinity with our own current situation, facing new challenges, our world turned upside down, which is what many people felt during that time. Out of all of this turmoil, however, came great literature including lyric poems by John Donne and others exploring love and desire, doubt and faith, sex and God. Donne also wrote a series of Devotions grappling with mortality over a course of 23 days when he was suffering from typhus or relapsing fever and almost died. Others turned to find solace in the natural world and friendship (Amelia Lanyer, Katherine Philips, Henry Vaughan). Robert Burton wrote a book on melancholy, which he kept adding to. Francis Bacon thought a revolution in science could redeem the world. Thomas Browne, a physician as well as writer, tackled the problem of intolerance and religious conflict. Thomas Hobbes thought only a firm (authoritarian?) government could reestablish peace and security, while Gerard Winstanley (a “Leveller”) thought that owning land (and money) was the source of all war and misery. Transgressive women had their own ideas. The Quaker leader Margaret Fell defended women's right to preach. We will read selections from these and other writers, understanding them in their historical context and with a sense of their current resonance.The seventeenth century was a century of revolution, giving birth to modern ways of thinking, and calling into question many of the old ways. In the early years, many were affected by melancholy, some believing the world was approaching the endtimes. England experienced plagues, particularly in London, and other catastrophes. So we might find some affinity with our own current situation, facing new challenges, our world turned upside down, which is what many people felt during that time. Out of all of this turmoil, however, came great literature including lyric poems by John Donne and others exploring love and desire, doubt and faith, sex and God. Donne also wrote a series of Devotions grappling with mortality over a course of 23 days when he was suffering from typhus or relapsing fever and almost died. Others turned to find solace in the natural world and friendship (Amelia Lanyer, Katherine Philips, Henry Vaughan). Robert Burton wrote a book on melancholy, which he kept adding to. Francis Bacon thought a revolution in science could redeem the world. Thomas Browne, a physician as well as writer, tackled the problem of intolerance and religious conflict. Thomas Hobbes thought only a firm (authoritarian?) government could reestablish peace and security, while Gerard Winstanley (a “Leveller”) thought that owning land (and money) was the source of all war and misery. Transgressive women had their own ideas. The Quaker leader Margaret Fell defended women's right to preach. We will read selections from these and other writers, understanding them in their historical context and with a sense of their current resonance. Spring 2026: ENGL BC3166 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ENGL 3166 001/00151 M W 10:10am - 11:25am 409 Barnard Hall Achsah Guibbory 3 25/30
How and why might we read Milton now? And how do his writings and thinking intersect with issues in our present moment? We will read his influential epic Paradise Lost after reading selections of Milton's earlier poetry and prose (attack against censorship, defenses of divorce, individual conscience, toleration, complicated issues of political and religious liberty). He wrote about these matters as he was involved in the English Civil war, an advocate of liberty (we will consider what kind, for whom?) and revolution, which Americans would embrace as inspiration and to justify the American Revolution. We will critically read Milton’s literary and political texts within the contexts of religious, political, and cultural history of early modern England and Europe but also colonial and revolutionary America—asking difficult questions, and with a sense of how Milton’s writing connects to present issues of our time
The "Scientific Revolution" began in England in the early seventeenth century, with the experiments of John Dee and the reforming projects of Francis Bacon, to culminate in Isaac Newton’s discovery of the natural laws of motion. This was also a period of great literary innovation, from Shakespeare’s plays and the metaphysical poetry of Marvell and Donne, to the new genre of the novel. This course will explore both the scientific and literary "revolutions" – indeed we will attempt to put them in a kind of conversation with one another, as poets and scientists puzzled over the nature of spirit, body, and the world.
Love him or hate him—or both, as is more often and more fittingly the case—you must admit that Freud turned the world upside-down. Against the supposed supremacy of rational consciousness, he found the power of the unconscious. At the heart of civilized order, he uncovered ever more sophisticated mechanisms of repression. Where the world saw the march of progress, he saw the death drive. And he discovered all of this through a new invention, a science of narrative, called psychoanalysis. According to this science, we are the stories we tell. And this means that we, our lives, our joys and anxieties, our past and our future, are like any story: always open to interpretation. In this course, we turn this lens back upon psychoanalysis, opening its clinical history and fundamental concepts to critical, literary interpretation. Beginning with Freud but moving beyond him, we will read foundational psychoanalytic texts alongside plays, poetry, novels, short stories, and films that corroborate, complicate, and contest the Freudian framework. We will consider the intrinsically literary qualities of psychoanalysis and, inversely, we will ask what literature, literary criticism, and literary theory gain or lose in this critical relation to psychoanalysis.
ENGL BC3172Marxist Materialisms: Change the World4.00
Philosophers have only interpreted the world, wrote Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach: the point is to change it. Perhaps this is the origin of theory. In this seminar we will examine theories that both explain the world and help us change it, to make it more peaceable, sustainable, equal, and just. Our point of departure is therefore Marx and his understanding of equality rooted in economic justice. We will familiarize ourselves with concepts such as capital and class consciousness, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation, and explore how they have been used to rethink literary and mass cultural forms and their ongoing transformations in a changing world system. Other theorists may include J-J Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, Franz Fanon, Eric Williams, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Gayatri Spivak, Vivek Chibber, Achille Mbebe, Kohei Saito, Giovanni Arrighi, Pascale Casanova, Slavov Zizek, and Melinda Cooper. Seminar members are invited to bring examples from texts – poems, novels, art, film, media, and digital culture –that reveal, through their depictions of injustice, what justice might be
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 100 students. In the seventeenth century, a new genre appears across Europe: the novel. Why does it appear? What accounts for its increasing popularity across the eighteenth century? What role does it play, in personal psychology as well as society? To puzzle these questions, we will place the development of the novel within the history of art, philosophy and science, as well as psychology and literary theory. Readings may include novels by Mme. de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, the Marquis de Sade, William Godwin, and Jane Austen, as well as essays by Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Elias, Moretti, and others
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 50 students. “We have become a novel-reading people,” wrote Anthony Trollope in 1870. “Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid.” This course will consider why the novel was so important to Victorian culture and society. What made the Victorian novel such a fertile form for grappling with the unprecedented cultural changes of the nineteenth century? To address this question, we will explore how Victorian novels both responded to, and participated in, major social and cultural shifts of the period, including industrialism and urbanization; colonialism and empire; the changing status of women, sexuality, and marriage; the emergence of Darwinism; class conflict and social reform; and the expansion of education and literacy. This course will also consider more broadly what novels are for, and what the Victorians thought they were for. Do novels represent the world as it really is, or do they imagine it as it ought to be? What kinds of solutions to social and political problems can novels offer? Can novels ethically improve (or corrupt) their readers? We will consider these issues in the context of realism, Victorian literature’s trademark genre, but we’ll also explore an array of other genres, such as the industrial novel, the Bildungsroman, the sensation novel, detective fiction, and gothic fiction. Authors include Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and others
This course surveys American literature written before 1800. While we will devote some attention to the literary traditions that preceded British colonization, most of our readings will be of texts written in English between 1620 and 1800. These texts--histories, autobiographies, poems, plays, and novels--illuminate the complexity of this period of American culture. They tell stories of pilgrimage, colonization, and genocide; private piety and public life; manuscript and print publication; the growth of national identity (political, cultural, and literary); Puritanism, Quakerism, and Deism; race and gender; slavery and the beginnings of a movement towards its abolition. We will consider, as we read, the ways that these stories overlap and interconnect, and the ways that they shape texts of different periods and genres
Texts from the late Republican period through the Civil War explore a range of intersecting literary, political, philosophical, and theological issues, including the literary implications of American independence, the status of Native Americans, the nature of the self, slavery and abolition, gender and woman's sphere, and the Civil War. Writers include Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Emily Dickinson
This interdisciplinary course situates late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature within the context of historical and cultural change. Students read works by Whitman, Twain, James, Griggs, Wharton, Faulkner, and Hurston alongside political and cultural materials including Supreme Court decisions, geometric treatises, composite photography and taxidermy
American fiction from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Writers include Rowson, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott, Twain, James, Wharton, Faulkner, Wright.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 56 students. In the wake of World War II, the so-called American Century rises out of the ashes of fascism, haunted by the specter of bombs blurring the boundary between victory and defeat. An ideological civil war ensues, punctuated by literary resistance to grand narratives and their discontents. Authors include Ellison, O’Connor, Ginsberg, Bishop, Pynchon, Robinson, Merrill, Morrison, Didion, and Wallace
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 45 students. Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments. Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion. Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others
Examines formal changes in the novel from nineteenth-century realism to stream of consciousness, montage, and other modernist innovations. Social and historical contexts include World War I, urbanization, sexuality and the family, empire and colonialism. Works of Henry James, E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce.
This course examines how postmodernism’s profound distrust of language and narrative transforms the form and function of literature. Writers include James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Auster, John Ashbery, J.M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Lyn Hejinian. Spring 2026: ENGL BC3189 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ENGL 3189 001/00156 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am 203 Diana Center Kristi-Lynn Cassaro 3.00 26/40
BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL)., BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Selective survey of fiction from the ex-colonies, focusing on the colonial encounter, cultural and political decolonization, and belonging and migration in the age of postcolonial imperialism. Areas covered include Africa (Achebe, Aidoo, Armah, Ngugi); the Arab World (Mahfouz, Munif, Salih, Souief); South Asia (Mistry, Rushdie, Suleri); the Carribean (Kincaid); and New Zealand (Hulme).
Prerequisites: Enrollment restricted to Barnard students. Open to all students.This course teaches clear writing and provides exposure to a range of interpretative strategies. Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester
In this course, we will trace the complex category of imitation from its ancient roots to some of its modern theoretical and literary manifestations. Interpreted differently by different thinkers, imitation can refer to the problem of art’s imitation of things in the world (e.g., your portrait looks like you), art’s imitation of other artistic works (e.g., your portrait looks like a Rembrandt), people’s imitation or even mimicry of one another (who does she think she is?). The latter form of imitation raises the most overtly socio-political questions, whether by replicating social power structures in order to “pass” in a potentially hostile environment or by subverting these same structures through mimicking, outwitting, critiquing, or mocking them. At its core, the category of imitation focuses our attention on what is so central to artmaking that it almost eludes our notice: the question of resemblance. Put in its simplest form: What are we doing (philosophically, artistically, socially) when we make one thing resemble another?
As a discipline, World Literature dates back to the early 19 th century and Goethe’s concept of weltliteratur. Yet, despite the fact that Goethe was well-versed in the literature of the “Orient” and emphasized their centrality in weltliteratur, the languages that he spoke of and underlined within the formation of this literature were mostly German and Romance languages. Institutionally speaking, not much has changed over the past couple of centuries. More often than not, studying the literature of locations such as the Middle East, Africa, and East and Southeast Asia takes place in Area Studies departments, and offerings of these areas’ literatures even in Comparative Literature departments are few and far in between. This course looks at a sample of texts that might be studied within the rubric of World Literature in an English department. We will examine foundational genres in English literary studies, such as epic and lyric poetry and free verse, dramatic literature, and the novel, and study variations of these genres in other literary traditions. Given that we’re reading many of the texts in translation, the issue of translating literary texts into English is a central component of our discussion. Specifically, we will think about the role that translation plays in the production and politics of World Literature and how the issue of translation differentiates between the disciplines of Comparative Literature and World Literature. We will also study adaptations of and artistic responses to canonical works. Some questions we will tackle include: What/where/whom constitutes the world in World Literature? Traditionally, why have some types of writing and inscription been privileged over others when determining the category of literature? How do we read similarities and differences in the texts while placing them in their particular contexts and histories?
(Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3204 World Literature Revisited I and ENGL BC3205 World Literature Revisited II in sequence; you may take them in any order.) As a discipline, World Literature dates back to the early 19th century and Goethe’s concept of weltliteratur. Yet, despite the fact that Goethe was well-versed in the literature of the “Orient” and he emphasized their centrality in weltliteratur, the languages that he spoke of and underlined within the formation of this literature were mostly German and Romance languages. Institutionally speaking, not much has changed over the past couple of centuries. More often than not, studying the literature of locations such as the Middle East, Africa, or East Asia takes place in Area Studies departments, and offerings of these areas’ literatures in Comparative Literature departments are few and far in between. In World Literature Revisited I, we imagined what a survey of World Literature in a literary studies department could look like, as we dealt with ancient texts until around the 14th century, with a focus on origin stories and epic narratives, lyric poetry, historical narratives, and sacred/religious texts. In World Literature Revisited II, we will continue to investigate and challenge the categories of “Eastern” and “Western” literature and think through the categories of “world” and “literature” in the course title. In this part of the course, we will work on (classical, early modern, and modern) drama, modern poetry, and the novel, with a particular focus on reading in comparison adaptations, appropriations, and literary responses. What/where/whom constitutes the world in World Literature? How can we read and trace literary influence across these literatures without reducing them to a mere repetition of the same themes and ideas? Finally, we will think about the role that translation plays in the production and politics of World Literature, particularly when it comes to adaptations and appropriations, and how the issue of translation differentiates between the disciplines of Comparative Literature and World Literature
"Yes, globalization can produce homogeneity, but globalization is also a threat to homogeneity." --Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Case for Contamination," New York Times Magazine, 2006 Thinking through the arguments both in favor of and against globalization, particularly in the realm of cultural productions, in this course we will discuss the "global" novel. To that end, we will read essays from The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century about works such as Americanah, Snow, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (along with the novels themselves) to investigate what is meant by "global" and what the criteria for including novels in this categorization are. We will also consider whether there is an erasure of cultural difference and nuance in reading novels using a globalizing perspective in order to render them more approachable for a (primarily) US audience. In order to think through and challenge this category of the global, we will also read novels that can be roughly categorized as postcolonial. We will thus consider how struggles for independence and the desire to locate one’s identity either within freshly liberated nation-states or in the process of immigrating to former metropoles could give rise to cultural and psychological anxieties. We will also consider the manner in which late-stage capitalism could indeed push toward homogenized senses of self that manifest in a category such as the "global novel" and whether arguments could be made in favor of such homogenization. Ultimately, we will think about the politics of globalization and the desire to include in or exclude from the “global” certain locations, cultural products, or peoples
ENGL BC3208WHAT'S YOUR STORY ANYWAY? - TRAUMA RESISTANCE THROUGH CREATIVE WRITING3.00
Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. In this class we will explore the process of healing from trauma through the art of storytelling. We will ground ourselves in the writing of Latina authors whose work demonstrates the resistance from erasure in the United States. The goal of the class is to understand the connection between trauma and healing, through storytelling and creative writing. Moreover, we will develop three pieces of creative non-fiction that will encompass this relationship over the three different lenses of place, person and personal experience
ENGL BC3214LATINX AND THE ICE/PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX - ACCESS AND STRATEGIES FOR NEWS COVERAGE4.00
This course encompasses themes of race, ethnicity, mass incarceration, and immigration in the modern United States, with special attention to the stories of Latinx people. We will consider the roles of journalistic writing, documentaries, and personal narratives in shaping public policy and attitudes towards lives behind bars. Guest speakers will also provide personal experiences to help reframe our own narratives and perspectives on these issues. The course’s primary goal is to challenge the process of how stories of race, immigration, and mass incarceration are written, by developing scholarly pieces
Although Victorian fiction is best known today for its realist commitment to representing the world “as it really is,” especially in genres such as the courtship novel and the Bildungsroman, Victorian novelists also wrote during an age of enthusiastic scientific inquiry that questioned and revised the very fabric of the reality that realist genres purported to represent. This course will accordingly explore the more adventurous and speculative fiction of the Victorian period that was most closely attuned to these new ways of representing and thinking about reality. How did new scientific developments such as evolutionary theory in biology, and the atomic theory in physics, reshape how writers viewed the relationships between human and animal, self and other, space and time, body and mind? How did departing from traditional realist modes enable Victorian science fiction writers to explore the ethical, social, and political implications of scientific theories in ways that scientific prose may not have envisioned? In this course we will read major works of Victorian fiction, by such authors as Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, alongside selections of scientific prose in such fields of Victorian science as biology, physics, mathematics, anthropology, and psychology. Throughout the course, we will understand “science” to include both major developments in the history of science, such as the emergence of evolutionary thought, as well as more eccentric Victorian areas of inquiry, such as phrenology, mesmerism, telepathy, and degeneration. The first three units into which the course is divided each explore a major field of Victorian science alongside a major conceptual category that it challenged and altered: biology and the nature of the human; psychology and the constitution of the self; the physical sciences and the nature of space and time. In each unit, we will investigate how writers’ engagements with these conceptual questions led them to experiment with literary categories such as character, narration, and plot. The course will close with a unit on texts that more broadly address Victorian conceptions of progress, technology, and development. In addition to these specific thematic and formal questions, we will think broadly about how the Victorians understood the value of science and technology in relation to the arts and to literature, and ask what their answers to these questions can offer us as we navigate similar questions today. What does scientific thinking offer to literature, and what kinds of questions can literature answer that scientific prose cannot? Do technological and scientific progress open up utopian vistas for humanity’s future, or are they more likely to lead to dystopian nightmares? Throughout the course, we will explore the resources that the literary imagination offers for thinking through the social consequences of scientific theories. Spring 2026: ENGL BC3215 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ENGL 3215 001/00155 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am 207 Milbank Hall Jayne Hildebrand 3.00 23/30
ENGL BC3218THE 'ETHNIC' IN THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE3
This course proposes to examine the implications of what Trinh T. Minh-Ha has called "specialness," or the distinctiveness of "ethnic" or "third world" experience, as it is represented and consumed in the literary marketplace (including classes like this one). That consumption has a discourse of its own, centered on often conflicting demands for authenticity. The test of authenticity for one reading community might be a book's perceived difference from that community's own experience; for another community (usually the one the author is perceived as coming from), the same book must represent a familiar experience to pass the test. Some questions we will address: How might "ethnic" writing and production both expose itself to and insulate itself from critique via claims to authenticity? How does an author negotiate others' demands for a certain kind of authenticity, and his or her own deeply felt (authentic?) need to consolidate identity by returning to ethnic “origins”? What in a set of publisher’s or reader’s demands for the “real” form or shape what we determine to be “fake”? We will study the primary texts in the context of mainstream literary reviews and other theoretical/polemical statements concerning the “meaning” of ethnic experience. Authors studied may include: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodriguez, Ishmael Reed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Jeanine Cummins, and Trinh Minh-Ha.
"New York in Ten Objects" introduces students to the creative possibilities of the podcast. Drawing on the possibilities of interdisciplinary analysis and creative non-fiction, this course aims to use quotidian objects to critically engage with the city, re-rendering those objects extraordinary and telling untold stories. The starting points for our investigation are ten concrete objects – some iconic, some ironic, but all characteristic of New York City. Beginning with these objects, students will develop projects, in small groups and individually, that connect these objects with a broader societal movement, cultural idea, political cause, or scientific development significant to past or present New York City life. To prepare students to develop their projects in an audio medium, we will first become familiar with a range of current podcasts, and will begin to break down the elements of podcast-storytelling as practiced today. Through workshops with IMATS in a weekly lab session and hands-on experience, students will learn how to collect audio interviews, ambient sound, and to record voice-over narration. Every student will outline their ideas, develop scripts, and produce a podcast by layering and editing their audio files. In the end, this course will investigate how the popular medium of the podcast can serve as a locus of local conversation and public intellectual activity. Students will learn how ordinary objects can breathe life into a story and how audio stories can advance critical analysis. Applications are due by 1 August: https://forms.gle/Gtb5YWgeq59Mnfhy5. Please note that this seminar is limited to 14 students. You will be notified of your acceptance or non-acceptance to the course before the first day of classes. After receiving admittance into the course, you MUST come to the first class to secure your seat
Writing sample required to apply: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses In this class we will discuss the narrative of the "American" story, and how stories of immigrants and minority identities redefine and complicate it. The goal of the class is to investigate how writers frame a sense of identity in relation to the "American ideal". We will explore this theme through three creative non-fiction pieces each focusing on a different perspective of place, person, and personal experience. What are your stories, and what makes them "American"?
ENGL BC3242LITERATURE OF LIBERATION BEFORE 19003.00
“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” wrote the abolitionist writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper a few years after the Civil War. This course explores the creative productions, critiques, and political projects of colonized people themselves, specifically focusing on writers in the indigenous, African American, and global anti-imperialist traditions. How did these heterogeneous communities differently diagnose the context of colonialism? What positive horizons of freedom, equality, and democracy did they aspire towards? What do their works tell us about gender, land, and labor? We explore themes of sovereignty against settler colonialism in the work of indigenous writers like Kandiaronk, William Apess, E. Pauline Johnson, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala Sa, and Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii. Next, we read the African American abolitionist tradition, beginning with Phillis Wheatley and slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs) followed by works by Harriet Wilson, Ida B. Wells, and Machado de Assis. The final third of the class will focus on works by those encountering imperialism in Egypt, South Asia, Latin America, the Philippines, and China: Al-Jabarti, Dinabandhu Mitra, José Martí, Jose Rizal, Huang Zunxian, and Qiu Jin
Why are stepmothers and stepdaughters inevitable enemies in folk and fairy tales? Why are fathers blameless and biological mothers absent (and usually dead)? And how do these narratives, so deeply woven into our own media and language, affect our sense of our own lived reality? In this course, we’ll untangle the complicated web of relationships between mothers, daughters, and stepmothers in folk and fairy tales, from ancient Rome to current cinema. We’ll read analytic psychology, feminist literary theory, cultural history, and other critical perspectives to help us analyze the absent mother, virginal daughter, hapless father, and evil stepmother tropes across time and space, so we can defamiliarize these familiar figures and develop a deeper understanding of how and why they dominate the popular imagination. This is an upper-level course, with priority for juniors and seniors
This class is organised around one book, Swann’s Way, volume one of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, a work that is central to the history of the novel. Due to the length and complexity of the six volumes that make up In Search of Lost Time, it is not a novel that benefits from a schematic reading. It calls, instead, on our attention to be paid in an unusually close manner. It is a novel that is committed to the details, to close observation and the expansive and meditative nature of the life of the mind. Therefore, as well as being about Proust’s work, the class is also concerned with questions of attention. As Adorno argued, In Search of Lost Time is a book that is “against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above…” Students will get a chance to read Swann’s Way—a book that is just under 500 pages long—in great depth over the course of the semester. And because the adjective “Proustian”, it could be argued, has come to refer to works that have both succeeded as well as preceded Proust himself, students will be introduced to works by authors who might have influenced Proust — such as: Baudelaire, Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin and Ralph Waldo Emerson — as well as examples of writers who had been inspired by Proust’s work — such as: Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Javier Marias, Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. Creative and analytic close reading will be the primary tool of analysis
The late Middle Ages and early Renaissance saw an explosion in the use of the first-person singular "I" by European writers of narrative texts. Although these narratives – among them dream visions, philosophical allegories, spiritual autobiographies, and straight-up novels – do not always correspond to modern ideas about autobiography, they nonetheless demonstrate a growing interest in such "autobiographical" topics as personal identity, sexual difference, mental illness, and disability, even as they experiment with a variety of literary forms and raise fundamental questions about the relationship between truth and writing. Writers will include Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Christine de Pisan, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich and Teresa de Cartagena, among others. No foreign language experience is required for this course, but knowledge of Latin or Romance languages may be useful
This upper-level research-oriented seminar will engage with literary expressions of the universally interesting topic of marriage. Tony Tanner in his famous Adultery in the Novel characterizes marriage as “the structure which supports all structure.” Contemporary critics have seen marriage as essential to maintaining the “family values” of the bourgeoisie; feminists and Marxists have challenged the economic assumptions of patriarchally-defined marriage. Folklorists have treated marriage as the endpoint of the search for a safe domestic space. Starting in ancient times with classic fairy tales and the Hebrew Bible, moving on to a famous medieval poem, a medieval memoir, and three nineteenth-century novels, we will encounter cultural expressions which address intimate partnerships with an emphasis on marriage as a defining condition
ENGL BC3250INTRODUCTION TO US LATINX LITERATURE3.00
This course introduces students to a growing body of work by Latina and Latino writers in the United States, and engages with the critical tools necessary for analyzing a field of inquiry and practice that continues to reframe itself, right down to the label "Latinx." What does that name include, and what does it exclude, in cultural productions born of conflicts of origin, language, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality? For some understanding of context, we will turn to the history and pressures of transnational migration, exile, assimilation, bilingualism and queerness as these variously affect the means and modes of the literary productions with which we're concerned. At the same time, the course will emphasize the invented and hybrid nature of Latinx literary and cultural traditions, and it will investigate the place of those inventions in the larger framework of American intellectual and literary traditions. Readings will be drawn from work written primarily in English, but we will also consider graphic novels, Latinx performance, and works in translation
This class will investigate the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel is shaped by the forces of horror, sensation, suspense and the supernatural. We will ask how the melodramatic imagination, the rhetoric of monstrosity, and the procedures of detection mark high narrative realism with the signs of cultural anxieties building up around nineteenth-century revolution, industrialization, capitalism, bigamy, Catholicism and immigration. Looking at representative samples of the Romantic neo-gothic novel, mid-century ghost stories, the highly popular and controversial sensation novels of the 1860’s along with their spectacular iterations on the Victorian stage, we will come away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the intersection between the novel and popular entertainment. Readings will probably include Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Brontë’s Villette, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Collins’s The Woman in White, Dickens’s Bleak House, Stoker’s Dracula, plays by Boucicault, Hazelwood, Lewis, and Wood, and ghost stories by Edwards, Gaskell, Hood, and Mulock
Sophomore standing required. Attend first class for instructor permission. Registering for the course only through Student Planning or SSOL will NOT ensure your enrollment. Explores the transformation of sociality, consciousness and geo-politics by and as media technologies during the long 20th century. Students will read influential works of media analysis written during the past century, analyze audio-visual analog and digital media, and explore political theory and media theory written since the rise of the internet. Final projects on contemporary media forms
ENGL BC3281ILLEGAL IS NOT A NOUN: DISRUPTING NARRATIVES OF THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE4.00
This course engages with narratives about detention and deportation in the modern United States, with special attention to the stories of Latinx people. We will analyze how journalistic writing, documentaries, and personal narratives shape public policy and American attitudes about the "the immigrant experience." What are these narratives, how are they told, and what are their implications? How do writers disrupt these narratives? We will develop four scholarly essays over the course of the semester to investigate these questions
The literary mode we call “romance” has been enormously popular and influential from its origins in Hellenistic antiquity to current science fiction, and at all levels of textual ambition from popular culture to canonical literature. Within this mass of material, one constant element is romance’s encounter with boundaries. This course will explore such boundary moments in texts from the 5th to the 20th centuries: boundaries and transgressions of desire (romances of marriage and adultery), of time (the reimagining of antiquity), of national foundation, of geography (settings in a fantasy east), of gender, and of class, indeed the boundary of the human and the monstrous
ENGL BC3291FICTIONS OF LAW AND CUSTOM: WHITENESS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE3.00
This course examines "white" American identity as a cultural location and set of discourses and traditions with a history—in Mark Twain’s terms, "a fiction of law and custom." What are the origins of "Anglo-Saxon" American identity? What are the borders, visible and invisible, against which this identity has leveraged position and power? How have these borders shifted over time, and in social and cultural space? How has whiteness located itself at the center of political, historical, social and literary discourse, and how has it been displaced? How does whiteness mark itself, or mask itself, in literature and in larger cultural practices? What does whiteness look like, sound like, and feel like from the perspective of the racial "other"? And in what ways do considerations of gender and class complicate these other questions?
The cultural history of New York City is inextricable from the history of LGBTQI+ life. American poetry, theatre, ballet, opera, and visual art would be unrecognizable if New York had not been a hub for LGBTQI+ people. In this sprawling city, life could be characterized equally by its anonymity as by the sometimes exacting bonds of its many tight-knit sub-communities. This course will provide a survey of LGBTQI+ literature and some related arts based in the city, starting in the colonial era and extending to the present day.
Language is the writer’s instrument; what happens when there is more than one language to choose from, or when a dominant or initial language is replaced by another? What inspires, or necessitates, a writer to practice exophony: to migrate into “foreign” linguistic territory? And in the case of bilingual or plurilingual writers, what factors determine the language(s) chosen for creative expression, and what might cause that choice to shift over time? To what degree do exophonic writers create a third, hybrid language? And how might their works underscore the mutability and instability of language itself? This seminar will focus on a series of women who, either for political or personal reasons, have reshaped and revised their linguistic points of reference, radically questioning—and perhaps willfully subverting—notions of nationality, identity, linguistic normativity, and a “mother tongue”. Special attention will be paid to the reception of exophonic writers, to feminist narratives of separation and self-fashioning, to mother-daughter dyads, to cases of self-translation, to colonialist and post-colonialist frameworks, and to how the phenomenon of exophony further complicates, but also enriches, the translator’s task. Readings will combine literary texts with essays, interviews, and theoretical writings by and about exophonic writers. In addition to analytical papers, students will have the opportunity to experiment writing in another language and translating themselves into English. All readings will be in English; advanced reading knowledge of a foreign language is recommended but not required
ENGL BC3296AGAINST COLONIALISM, AGAINST FASCISM4.00
The Caribbean poet Aimé Cesairé argued that the terrors of World War II simply reflected colonial practices returned home to their origin, Western Europe. This course investigates the relationship between fascism and colonialism, during moment when we are experiencing a global rise in right-wing authoritarian governments premised on anti-migrant politics. What is the relationship between fascism and colonialism, and democracy, equality, and internationalism? What are the class alliances behind fascism? What are institutions that facilitate it? In a spirit of internationalism, this class brings together classic anti-colonial and anti-fascists works under one umbrella. We will start by reading theoretical texts by Umberto Ecco, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, G.M. Tamás, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gandhi, Tagore, Nancy Cunard, and George Padmore. Texts include: The Underdogs, Azuela’s novel of the Mexican Revolution; Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir of Italian fascism; The Seventh Cross, a thrilling novel about escaping a German concentration camp by Anne Seghers, who herself escaped through France; Arab writers Etel Adnan, Emile Habibi, and Ghassan Kanafani; My Tender Matador by Chilean queer/trans author Pedro Lemebel; Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman; Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Roy; and Kureishi and Frears’s queer countercultural film, Sammie and Rosie Get Laid
ENGL BC3297UNSILENT VOICES: THE MEDIEVAL LYRIC IN EUROPE3.00
From the fall of the Western Empire to the Protestant Reformation, a period of over 1000 years, poets in Europe produced an extraordinarily rich and varied body of lyric poetry that continues to exert a major influence on world literature today. While some of this poetry is religious in nature, a great deal also addresses such diverse themes as desire, selfhood, politics, gender, and humanity’s relation to the non-human world. In this class we will examine medieval lyrics originally composed in a number of languages including but not limited to Old and Middle English, Latin, Occitan, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, French, German and Portuguese. Aspiring polyglots welcome, but all readings will be provided in English translation. This course presumes no previous knowledge of medieval history or literature
ENGL BC3299THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EFFECT: EARLY MODERN TO MODERN4.00
American poetry after 1960 famously took on a new intimacy and freshness of tone. Often called “confessional,” this poetry often does not actually express the kind of guilty self-revelation such a term implies. As the critic David Kalstone put it, “American poetry of this period became increasingly available to autobiographical energies of all sorts, not simply to writing which was desperate and on the edge.” This course examines some of that poetry, and its non-confessional use of an autobiographical “I.” We will explore how this poetry, far from representing a rejection of tradition, drew on early modern work to imbue seemingly modern autobiographical effects with new quickness and life
What makes the essay of personal experience an essay rather than a journal entry? How can one's specific experience transcend the limits of narrative and transmit a deeper meaning to any reader? How can a writer transmit the wisdom gained from personal experience without lecturing her reader? In The Art of the Essay, we explore the answers to these questions by reading personal essays in a variety of different forms. We begin with Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century philosopher who popularized the personal essay as we know it and famously asked, “What do I know?,” and follow the development of the form as a locus of rigorous self-examination, doubt, persuasion, and provocation. Through close reading of a range of essays from writers including Annie Dillard, George Orwell, Jamaica Kincaid, and June Jordan, we analyze how voice, form, and evidence work together to create a world of meaning around an author's experience, one that invites readers into conversations that are at once deeply personal and universal in their consequences and implications
“Yes, globalization can produce homogeneity, but globalization is also a threat to homogeneity.” — Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” New York Times Magazine, 2006. Thinking through the arguments both in favor of and against globalization, particularly in the realm of cultural productions, in this course we will discuss the “global” novel. To that end, using the introductory essay from The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century as a starting point to discuss five novels from across the globe, we’ll investigate what is meant by “global” and what the criteria for including novels in this categorization are. We will also consider whether there is an erasure of cultural difference and nuance in reading novels using a globalizing perspective in order to render them more approachable for a (primarily) US audience. In order to think through and challenge this category of the global, we will also read novels that can be roughly categorized as postcolonial. We will thus consider how struggles for independence and the desire to locate one’s identity either within freshly liberated nation-states or in the process of immigrating to former metropoles could give rise to cultural and psychological anxieties. We will also consider the manner in which late-stage capitalism could indeed push toward homogenized senses of self that manifest in a category such as the “global novel” and whether arguments could be made in favor of such homogenization. Ultimately, we will think about the politics of globalization and the desire to include in or exclude from the “global” certain locations, cultural products, or peoples
In this class, we will focus on queer narratives of the self to explore how authors represent queerness across centuries and genres, and how these queer narratives are informed by various historical, national, cultural and political contexts. Through a comparative, transnational and intersectional approach that takes into account the particularities of each author’s context, we will aim to answer the following questions: How do various cultural, national, linguistic, religious or political contexts affect the way queer identities are defined and represented in literature? How do these authors represent the intersections of queerness with race, class, ethnicity, disability and citizenship? How have queer narratives developed over time and across cultures in conversation with local and global modes of conceptualizing gender and sexuality? How do queer authors utilize the particularities of each genre to create new forms of self-expression? Texts will span various genres such as short stories, poems, memoirs, graphic novels, novels and personal essays by authors such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Sappho, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Adrienne Rich, Casey Plett and Imogen Binnie. Additionally, we will read critical and theoretical works that will urge us to consider these works from a range of perspectives, such as queer studies, feminist studies, disability studies, and transgender studies
This class offers a general introduction to English drama at the moment when it became a major art form. Renaissance London gave birth to a booming theatrical world, with plays that reflected the diverse urban life of the city, as well as the layered and often contradictory inner life of the individual. This poetically rich theater was less concerned with presenting answers, and more with staging questions—about gender, religion, power, love, sex, authority, class, violence, and more. We will encounter these questions in works by Shakespeare and other major authors who populated this literary scene: Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, the ever-popular “Anonymous,” and others. Putting them in dialogue with their social world, and situating them within a culture of performance, we will engage with the plays via detailed close reading and literary analysis
An interdisciplinary course focused on environmental humanities and based in the English department, “Changing Climate, Changing World” will examine the representation of nature across time and its implications for global warming and biodiversity from multiple perspectives, emphasizing issues of climate change and environmental justice. The course will provide a conceptual framework for reading and critiquing the representation of nature in the context of historical, economic, social, cultural, scientific and political change. The course design asks students to address climate change in the context of the industrial revolution before discussing environmental issues in a pre-industrial and finally a post-industrial context. We will begin in media res by addressing issues of industrialization and colonialism in the mid-18th and 19th century before considering indigenous, medieval, and renaissance representations of nature. In the second half of the course, we return to examine contemporary issues from the early 20th century to the present. The course will meet twice weekly in Spring 2025. One of these meetings will include a lecture with a guest faculty member from Barnard and Columbia, or occasionally with other experts, artists, and activists from New York and beyond, followed by questions from the audience on the lecture. The second meeting will emphasize student discussion of the lecture and associated readings, with the purpose of integrating each lecture into the total course framework. Since all the participating faculty are teaching full time, we will aim to schedule lectures in the late afternoon or evening to minimize conflicts. We would also like to open some of the lectures to the public, either virtually or in person, so that their impact could be felt beyond the class itself
ENGL BC3322POETRY AND THE POLITICS OF DECOLONIZATION4.00
The course looks at poets, writing in the twentieth century and after, whose work is concerned with liberation from colonial rule and, subsequently, with the formation of a post-colonial literary voice. Poetry in the period of decolonization deals with issues of national, racial, class and gender identity, place and displacement, and freedom from linguistic and political oppression. We will read, among others, poets from the Indian Subcontinent and Middle East such as Tagore, Iqbal, Faiz and Darwish; two leading poets of négritude, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, in relation to movements in Caribbean, African, and American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present (Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Nicolas Guillén); Latin American poets including Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Nicanor Parra; and English-language poets including W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and voices of more contemporary movements in poetry including the Beat, feminist, LGBTQ, indigenous, and "Black Lives Matter" movements. Using theory and historical background, we will look at the work of each poet comparatively in the context of international development and political change. The course offers a critical approach to globalization through literature; since decolonization has touched so much of the world, we are open to works from other literatures that students propose. Though class discussions will be in English, students are encouraged, to the greatest extent possible, to read the poetry in the original language. Please email me as needed for further information
Cannibals! Orphans! Strikes! Vampires! This course asks how do horror stories employ suspense and disgust to unsettle political, social, and ethical complacency in the hearts and minds of readers and audiences? We will consider the pan-media global adaptations, translations, reiterations, and afterlives of several powerful horror stories—maritime, domestic, industrial, and supernatural-- as they serially repeat across national borders, languages, historical periods, and delivery platforms, from novels, plays, and film to an underwater sculpture, photographs, paintings, advertisements, a graphic novel, and other aesthetic forms. We will read each adaptation in synchronic dialogue with its companions, in diachronic perspective, and through relevant theoretical lenses, comparing the priorities of aesthetic form in the context of the national, cultural, and the historical contingencies of class and race difference. Texts may include the Raft of the Medusa, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Germinal, Dracula and the Dybbuk. Familiarity with French, Yiddish, Russian, Wolof (Atlantique), Korean (Parasite) and Persian (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) welcome but not required. All majors welcome! (To count this course for the English major, all writing must focus on works originally published in English.)
ENGL BC3417PERSIAN POETICS IN WORLD LITERATURE4.00
Through a transcontinental network of poets and poetics from Iran and Russia to Germany and the United States, in this course we will: 1) learn about classical Persian poetry that was translated widely and contributed to the development of World Literature (the cornerstone of which was Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s weltliteratur) and to study different translations and adaptations of this poetry; 2) study world poetry that Iranian poets had translated into Persian and analyze how these translations may have affected modern Persian poetics; 3) read in comparison modern Persian poetry and African diasporic poetry, discuss the intersections of the power structures of gender, class, race and ethnicity, and analyze how these power structures manifested themselves in pre-revolutionary Iran (and ultimately, what can be learned from including this historical context in contemporary Caribbean and African American studies). On a broader scale, this course aims to place Persian poetry and poetics within a world literature discourse, both in terms of its historical contributions to this discourse as well as the discourse’s contributions to Persian poetics. It is meant to encourage you to investigate the role that translation plays in world literary studies; at the same time, it acknowledges the limits of global markets of literature and their politics of translation. Weeks eight through thirteen of the course in which Iranian poetry is put into conversation with African diasporic poetry, therefore, demonstrate the possibilities that open up in world literary studies when scholars expand their focus beyond proven literary connections and underscore cultural provenance as a basis for comparison
Change is fundamental to our experience as human beings, and the experience of change lies at the heart of most great stories. Sometimes this is a transition that the heroine has desired; other times, alteration and transformation arise from sources mysterious and unknown, or as a result of the journey the story has brought them. This course examines the element of change in a wide range of literature, from Ovid to Maggie Nelson, from Shakespeare to Roxane Gay—but it also provides an opportunity for students to consider the ways in which they, too have been changed—by joy, by trauma, by time. In addition to writing critically about the works we will read together, students will also write a personal essay about their experience of metamorphosis; this essay will be examined in a modified workshop format. At semester’s end, students will re-write and change that same essay, in hopes of seeing how revision on the page might provide a model for understanding the metamorphoses we experience as human beings on this earth. Authors will likely include Ovid, Kafka, Robert Louis Stevenson, Borges, Shaun Tan, Roxane Gay, George Saunders, Arthur C. Clarke, Shakespeare, and Maggie Nelson. There will be a final exam and a critical paper, as well as the personal essay, in two drafts
ENGL BC3456WHAT WILL SUFFICE: INCURSIONS INTO MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY WORLD POETRY3.00
Beginning with the radical breaks of Whitman, Dickinson, and Baudelaire, this course traces how, over the last two centuries, poets across continents have redefined what poetry can be in the face of modernity, exile, revolution, and personal crisis. Our focus will not be on national traditions in isolation but on the resonances and tensions that emerge when poets in different cultures and eras confront similar questions: What forms can poetry take in times of upheaval? How does exile reshape the lyric voice? When does poetry become a vehicle for revolution? And, in Wallace Stevens’s words, what will suffice for poetry when the theatre of the world has changed so profoundly? We will attend closely to the central issue of translation: how meaning and form shift across languages, and how those shifts shape our understanding of what poetry can do. We will focus on selections from a single author in each class. Readings and viewings will range from canonical figures such as Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Anna Akhmatova to experimental voices like Tristan Tzara, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Ntozake Shange, alongside contemporary lyricists like Lana Del Rey and Kendrick Lamar
In this course, we'll consider American texts about the supernatural. We'll begin in the colonial period, when many New Englanders interpreted surprising events as divine or demonic interventions. We'll look at texts about Salem witchcraft and colonial revivals, comparing the way authors argue that these events are supernatural or natural, divine or diabolical. We'll then consider American writers who use the supernatural to explore the human mind, issues of class and gender, and questions of history and identity. Throughout the course, we’ll also consider the way that supernatural stories function as entertainment, and consider the implications of choosing to entertain ourselves and each other with fear and wonder
The title of this course suggests that there are literatures across the “globe” written in English, and that we will study them. But this statement rests on a series of assumptions: the a priori existence of a globe with latitudes, longitudes, and borders; a singular category of “literature” produced in different geographical locations across the globe; and finally, that these literatures are written in English. During the course of the semester, we will investigate and (occasionally overturn) all three of these assumptions. In order to do so, we will read across different literary genres (short stories and novels, plays, poetry, and essays), while also reading texts that move between these genres or defy them altogether. We will read texts that were originally written in English, as well as texts that have been translated into English, and we will learn and discuss the term “global anglophone” along with the ways in which this term has been challenged. During our collective readings and discussions, we will map the locations that arise in each text and the locations out of which these texts arise. We will study the relationship between literature, translation, and mapping, and we will learn and discuss the concept of planetary thinking and writing as an alternative to border and global thinking
ENGL BC3536COMIC BOOK METROPOLIS: HOW NEW YORK CITY MADE AMERICAN COMICS3.00
This course explores how New York City didn't just host the American comics industry—it shaped what comics looked like, how they were sold, and what stories they told. We'll trace how the city's newspapers, newsstands, subway cars, tenement buildings, and even its crime waves left their mark on the page. We'll move chronologically from the 1890s to today, looking at moments when the city and the comics it produced were tightly linked: early newspaper strips born in the era of “yellow journalism”; the Golden Age publishers clustered in Midtown offices; the censorship battles of the 1950s; underground cartoonists working out of East Village apartments in the ’60s and ’70s; and the rise of graphic novels in bookstores and museums. Along the way, we'll ask: Why did superhero comics look the way they did? How did economic pressures shape page layout? What happens when the same city produces both blockbuster superhero titles and experimental art magazines? Readings range from early Sunday pages (the Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay) through Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Frank Miller’s Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns, to Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine, Ben Katchor’s urban wanderings, Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoons, and contemporary mainstream works like Hawkeye’s “Pizza Dog” issue. Famously, Eisner drew on his Bronx childhood to create A Contract with God, while Miller’s work channels the gritty, anxious New York of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But we’ll look at the full range of what the city made possible, from newspaper syndicates to underground comix to today’s independent publishers. You’ll learn to read comics closely by analyzing how panel grids, gutters, shadows, and perspectives work and by connecting those choices to the real-world conditions in which they were made. Optional Saturday field trips include Newspaper Row/City Hall Park (early press and Sunday pages), an East Village Underground walk (East Village Other/Gothic Blimp Works sites), and a visit to the Society of Illustrators/MoCCA (exhibition and archives orientation). Course assignments combine analytical writing, archival engagement, and original digital scholarship. In addition to two short close-reading essays, there is a final project that takes the form of either a Digital Exhibit or an Interactive Map, through which you use digital humanities tools to analyze how New York City’s physical geography, infrastructure, and cultural ecosystems shaped the American comics industry. Both formats require work with archival sources, metadata creation, and close formal analysis of comics, and all projects are accompanied by a short reflective essay that synthesizes research findings, site-specific or curatorial decisions, and close reading while critically assessing how the chosen digital tools shape historical interpretation
This course investigates “Asian American” literature as a nexus of two larger social forces: (1) migration, as a lens to investigate xenophobia, nationalism, settler violence, and working class struggle; and (2) imperialism, often a driving force that unleashes the travelers and refugees that comprise the former category. Adopting a heavily historical emphasis that will use Asian American identity as a lens to examine migration and imperialism, this course seeks to destabilize all three terms in its title: Asian, American, and literature. Students will (1) conduct an oral history with an Asian American or immigrant subject, (2) research Asian American little magazines and create a response on their own; and (3) write a final term paper. We will read many texts that are primary sources such as movement journals and little magazines and oral histories as well as other non-literary sources (e.g., Supreme Court decisions, pamphlets and op-eds for and against Chinese exclusion, letters from the Ghadar party of Sikh and Punjabi anti-colonialists, an audio recording of a South Asian woman who traveled on the Komagata Maru, demands from the Third World Liberation Front). We will read documents from the Chinese exclusion period alongside Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and the poems written by migrants detained at Angel Island—a theme of incarceration that we will pick up in reading about Japanese American incarceration. Other texts will explore proletarian power, such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In The Heart and Sujatha Gidla’s An Ant Among Elephants, or the American wars in Asia, such as Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred. Some writers will come from the boundaries of a Pan-Asian American identity, such as Arab modernist Ameen Rihani, or not be written by “Asian Americans” at all, such as the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man detained at Guantánamo Bay
ENGL BC3597OVID’S METAMORPHOSES AND THEIR LITERARY AFTERLIVES4.00
Ovid’s Metamorphoses have enchanted, and sometimes troubled, readers since they first appeared in the year 8 CE. This course is designed first, to read, closely, the Metamorphoses in its entirety. We will look at Hellenistic sources – Hesiod’s Theogony, Boios’s Orthinogonia, as well as the Heteroioumena by Alexander of Colophon. We will also investigate moments in their complex literary afterlife: in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in Shakespeare’s Tempest, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as Boccaccio and Dante. Finally we will look at some translations of the Metamorphoses, by Caxton and Gower, Dryden and Pope, as well as contemporary translations
ENGL BC3599GIRLS' SCHOOLS: THE LITERATURE OF WOMEN’S EDUCATION4.00
From the finishing school to the convent to the women’s college, spaces of female education have long fascinated writers. More than just academic spaces, these are also unique worlds of friendship and exclusion, desire and alienation, community and social fracture, conformity and transgression. In this course, we will explore how women’s education has been imagined in novels, poetry, and film from the early modern period to the present. Beginning with competing visions of women’s education in early feminist and anti-feminist thought, we’ll go on to explore how imaginative writers from the nineteenth century to the present have envisioned the girls’ school as both a literary and a social space. What kinds of cultural fantasies attach to these spaces, and what narratives and social relationships do they enable? How are differences of class, race, sexuality, and religion negotiated within them? Do girls’ schools offer a world apart from society, or do they recreate and intensify outside social dynamics within their walls? Our exploration will take us across genres and media, including the Bildungsroman, the detective novel, the narrative poem, and the horror film. Readings will include works by Charlotte Brontë, Fleur Jaeggy, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Sayers, Muriel Spark, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others
ENGL BC3609THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM OF CONSCIENCE FROM FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO THE PRESENT3.00
From Frederick Douglass’s The North Star, which insisted that journalism could be a tool for liberation and collective conscience, to today’s digital-first platforms, American journalism has always been a site of struggle over truth, power, and representation. This course explores the power of journalism to shape public conscience — from the days when print was the Twitter of its time to the rise of radio, television, and digital media. At its core, this seminar centers the voices of journalists of conscience — those who speak truth to power, challenge dominant narratives, and reflect the full spectrum of human experience. We will approach journalism through a lens that foregrounds the perspectives of people of color, recognizing how mainstream media has historically erased, distorted, or marginalized their voices while also highlighting the powerful traditions of resistance and self-representation in journalism. To foster meaningful connection and collaboration, students will be split into groups for the semester. These groups will meet in breakout rooms during each class session to workshop ideas, respond to prompts, and sometimes collaborate on short journalistic pieces. The goal is to make a large seminar feel intimate and to encourage peer-to-peer dialogue throughout the course. Through weekly readings, in-class discussions, site visits, guest speakers, and multimedia projects, students will examine how journalism has both reflected and resisted dominant narratives across history. Students will also create original work that embodies conscience-based journalism
Depression has existed since time immemorial. But our explanations of it have shifted, from sin to an imbalance of the humours, and a poetic inspiration; from the eighteenth-century mechanistic understanding of the self, to the Freudian family romance that generates trauma, and to our current neuro-genetic understanding of the mind as a machine that can achieve happiness with pharmaceutical intervention. We will follow these permutations, even as we read novels, poems, plays, and view film (and art) for their diagnostic awareness of mental suffering. And we will also ask the question: what if depression comes not from within but without, the intelligent response of aware minds to a world that has become undone
From its origins, and to the present, marriage has been transactional, arranged, and rarely concerned with the desires or interests of the wife. In the eighteenth-century, and especially through the genre of the novel, women began to insist on right to choose their spouse, and the possibility of marrying for love. Perversely, it is at this point that the descriptions of some of the most disastrous and repressive marriages enter literature, and in the twentieth century film. If “the course of true love never did run smooth” this seminar follows its path, investigating the shifts and transformations of marriage. While the focus of the seminar will be on women, we will also consider men, same-sex marriage, questions of marriage and race in the United States, and marriage in China
ENGL BC3750GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE AMERICAN STAGE: PERFORMING THE BODY POLITIC4.00
This seminar investigates how American theatre/performance, as read through the lens of gender and sexuality, operates as a cultural force. Simply put, the U.S. is obsessed with sex; theatre/performance has proven a fertile medium for America’s expression of this obsession. Exploring texts from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, we will consider how performance intersects with the nation state’s desire to regulate how we “practice” gender both publicly and behind closed doors and how that intersects, overlaps and influences the politics of American Identity. How is performance, which always includes gendered/raced/classed/sexualized bodies, situated in relationship to ideas of a national body politic? How does the American nation state hinge on how gender and sexuality are performed both on-stage and off?
In this course we probe the ideology of American “exceptionalism.” We treat the intellectual history of this idea as a transtemporal conversation among founding architects, contemporary agents, early critics, and visionary reformers, all concerned with what should be valued on the American continents and within American experience. We become cartographers of this conversation and interlocutors within it, as we explore how habits of conceiving truth, power, and the relationship of human beings to the natural world have controlled what counts as exceptional and what ordinary. Where should we direct our awe? Readings include works by Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, William James, Immanuel Kant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, Wallace Stevens, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams
Whether as sources of artistic creativity, symbols of moral decay, avenues of escape, or foundations for alternative forms of sociality, drugs are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for all manner of storytellers. Why is that? This course surveys the narrative history of “literature on drugs” from three angles: first, we examine poetry and fiction composed under the influence of mind-altering intoxicants; second, we study literature about drug-induced experiences and the counter-cultures they have fueled; and we ask why literary criticism is essential to articulate the danger and allure of drugs, past, present, and future. We will read from literary psychonauts including William Blake, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Anaïs Nin, and Hunter S. Thompson; historians of the highly weird like Michel Foucault and Erik Davis; and an array of primary sources on the legal, therapeutic, and psychological complexities of drug use, such as Billy Holiday, Sigmund Freud, William James, and Margaret Mead. We also will consider the cinematic history of literature on drugs with films like Altered States, Trainspotting, and Apocalypse Now. The course incorporates hands-on archival work and includes a visit to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Literature has always attracted the outsider, and literature itself seems to demand from its writers to momentarily step out of the fray in order to hope to observe it. The modern age has offered different examples of this. When Bernard Levin described V.S. Naipaul as an ‘inquiline’ author — meaning, a guest or a lodger, an animal that lives in another's nest — Naipaul responded: ‘When I see the sun set here at Stonehenge, there is a way that it is somebody else’s sun, somebody else’s landscape, it has somebody’s else's history connected with it. I can't avoid that: that's the way I think.’ When Virginia Woolf received news of the death of Joseph Conrad, she sat down and penned an admiring obituary that opens with what might be read as a presumptuously arrogant statement: ‘Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country.’ Despite Woolf’s English snobbishness, her words reveal something true about Conrad’s situation, and about the place of many other writers who were, for one reason or another, obliged to operate in foreign lands, inside other languages or states of being, authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Ovid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Waguih Ghali and David Malouf. Through the close analysis of a narrow selection of works, this class will chart the ways in which such works reveal the nature and imaginative location of the artist out of place. We will be interested in the question of to what extent is writing a process of mapping an intellectual, aesthetic, psychic or geographical territory. We will be motivated by close reading, interpretation, and the adventure of comparing different portraits of being an outsider-insider. We may refer to fragments by travellers and explorers such as Leo Africanus, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Ibn Battuta, or look at the work of artists who crossed boundaries, such as the 15th century Venetian painter Gentile Bellini and the impact of his visit to Mehmed II’s court in 1479, or the influence of the Arabesque on the music of Claude Debussy. We will explore what it is about literature and, in particular, the novel that has made it so well-suited for portraits of individuals existing out of place
ENGL BC3899READING ITALIANS: HER SIDE OF THE STORY3.00
“In Italy, literary fiction has long been considered a man’s game.” So began a 2019 New York Times article discussing the growing international attention being paid to Italian women writers, particuarly on the heels of Elena Ferrante’s phenomenal global success. This course will center the female voice and subjectivity in the Italian literary tradition, with a focus on celebrated prose writers active from the early twentieth century to the present. Some, recently republished and reconsidered for the Italian market, have also been re-translated and re- introduced to a wider English readership. We will trace the reception of female authors within the Italian critical establishment and abroad, and the role translation might play in broadening and amplifying their reputation and reach. We will focus on one author per week, paying special attention to themes of resistance, rebellion, and self-fashioning. All readings will be in English
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a concentration in creative writing. This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to focus on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project—such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers and a chapbook for poets. This means students will discuss work by writers who may not share their own genre. We will focus on generating new work, developing your writing process, and creating new possibilities and momentum for your piece, as well as trying to create a sense of community among the concentrators. We will also conduct in-class writing exercises in response to short reading assignments and class lectures. Students should be aware of two important notes: (1) This class is limited to senior English majors who have already been approved to be creative writing concentrators; and (2) this course fulfills the requirement for concentrators to finish a senior project, but not the academic senior seminar requirement. This class is about your own writing and that of your classmates. This class will be what you make of it! Spring 2026: ENGL BC3992 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ENGL 3992 001/00159 Th 11:00am - 12:50pm 502 Diana Center Idra Novey 4.00 9/10 Fall 2026: ENGL BC3992 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment ENGL 3992 001/00367 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm 405 Barnard Hall Ken Chen 4.00 10/10
ENGL BC3993SENIOR SEMINAR IN FILM AND LITERATURE4.00
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors. To see the current course description, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and Chair required. In rare cases, the English Department Chair may permit an English major not concentrating in theatre or writing to take ENGL BC3996 in combination with another course. Application required: https://english.barnard.edu/english/independent-studies. Senior English majors who are concentrating in writing and who have completed two creative writing courses will normally take this Special Project in combination with an additional creative writing course. Senior English majors who are concentrating in theatre and who have completed three courses in theatre history/dramatic literature will normally take this Special Project in combination with an additional dramatic literature course. For both writing and theatre concentrators, this combined special project counts in place of one senior seminar. In certain cases, ENGL BC3999 may be substituted for the Special Project. In rare cases, the English Department Chair may permit an English major not concentrating in writing or theatre to take ENGL BC3996 in combination with another course
Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and Department Chair. Application required: https://english.barnard.edu/english/independent-studies. Senior majors who wish to substitute Independent Study for one of the two required senior seminars should consult the chair. Permission is given rarely and only to students who present a clear and well-defined topic of study, who have a department sponsor, and who submit their proposals well in advance of the semester in which they will register. There is no independent study for screenwriting or film production
