ENGL UN

Subject

ENGL UN

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

(Lecture). This course aims to introduce you to a selection of sixteenth-century English verse and prose, from major works such as More's Utopia, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Sidney 's Defense of Poesie, to more occasional but illuminating excerpts. Although the classes will range widely across social, political and historical concerns, the focus will be on close reading of the texts. [NB This course fulfills the poetry requirement]

Subject

ENGL UN

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

(Lecture). Shakespeare II examines plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, primarily a selection of his major tragedies and his later comedies (or “romances”)

Subject

ENGL UN

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Concentrating on the drama of early modern England, this course will investigate a culture of surveillance regarding women’s bodies in the period. We will give special focus to the fear of female infidelity, the theatrical fascination with the woman’s pregnant body, and the cultural desire to confirm and expose women’s chastity. We will read plays in which women are falsely accused of adultery, in various generic contexts (such as William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing), along with plays in which women actually commit infidelity (such as the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside). Focusing on a different play each week, we will ask: what does it take, ultimately, to believe women about their fidelity? At the same time, what is the effect of being doubted on women themselves? We will also give consideration to the particular resources of dramatic form, paying attention to moments in plays that coerce spectators themselves into mistaken judgments about women. We will supplement our reading of drama with pamphlets, advice literature, poems, church court cases, and ballads, in order to place these plays within a broader and more varied culture of female surveillance in early modern England. Finally, we will work to recover past strategies of liberation from this surveillance in the plays we read, in women’s writing that warns against male betrayal, and in dramatic and historical instances of female cross-dressing

Subject

ENGL UN

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

The intellectual goals of the course are to understand the manuscript evidence for the text and to be able to read Chaucer with precision: precision as to the grammatical structure, vocabulary, rhymes, and meter of the text. Being such an enlightened, close reader will help students in many, if not all, of their other courses, and will be invaluable to them in most any job they will ever have thereafter

Subject

ENGL UN

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. The class will read the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary meritThe class will read the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary merit

Subject

ENGL UN

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu