ENGL GU

This course has several parallel purposes. First and foremost, we explore an enormously ambitious and brilliant work of literature, both in its local variety (the individual tales, their prologues and epilogues, their self-conscious placement within late medieval cultural conventions), and in its overarching structures. This of course involves learning about the language in which Chaucer wrote, Middle English. Second, we think about Chaucer’s position in late medieval literary culture, especially in England, and in the social world of his own day: at once a minor royal functionary and increasingly recognized as an important writer; an innovator in his immediate literary context but an historical situation of our own readership, for which Chaucer has become “Chaucer” (as he started to be in his own day), even many kinds of “Chaucer,” which continue to evolve as our reading culture does

Subject

ENGL GU

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

This lecture course surveys the non-dramatic literature of seventeenth-century England, with particular attention to its prose writings. The course will focus on topics including the new politics of the Jacobean court; the tensions leading to the civil wars; the so-called “scientific revolution” and its discontents; and the challenges of the Restoration, including plague and fire. Authors studied will include Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Aemelia Lanyer, George Herbert, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish. Abraham Cowley, and Katherine Philips.

Subject

ENGL GU

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

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

Subject

ENGL GU

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Prison literature—poems, plays, memoirs, novels, and songs written in prison or about prison—constitute a significant part of American literature. Prisons expose many of the systemic inequalities of American life, above all those based on racism and the enduring legacies of slavery. Using the tools of critical race theory, feminism, and class analysis, this course will explore the forms of cultural expression that have emerged in relationship to the American prison experience. Though the course will touch on the rise of convict leasing, chain gangs, and work farms as part of the penal system under Jim Crow, the main focus will be on developments in the U.S. prison system and in prison literature since the 1960s, roughly from the prison writing of George Jackson, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X to the outpouring of contemporary fiction and poetry about prison life by Jesmyn Ward, Colin Whitehead, Rachel Kushner, and Reginald Betts. This is the era of what Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow,” the rise of mass incarceration, the partial privatization of the penal system, and the growth of supermax facilities. Among the questions we will explore together are these: What tools and techniques do writers use to construct the prison experience? What are the affordances offered by various genres (drama, autobiography, poetry, the novel) for exploring the prison system and the systems of oppression that converge at that site? Does some literature of incarceration perpetuate damaging discourses about “felons,” or does it revise and complicate stereotypes and narratives about incarcerated individuals? How do narratives involving change, conversion, growing up, or being defeated operate in various genres of prison literature? What role do mourning, witnessing, testifying, and resistance play in such writing? What is the imagined audience of various genres of prison writing, that is, for whom is it written? What ethical and political demands does such writing make on us as readers, citizens, activists?

Subject

ENGL GU

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu