30 courses with the subject ENGL B, 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 B105HOLLYWOOD ON HOLLYWOOD1.0
How did Hollywood become a global powerhouse of cultural production? How have Hollywood films responded to technological and political change? What, frankly, does Hollywood think about itself? This class will provide an introduction to the history of Hollywood film production through the stories Hollywood has told about itself, from the golden age of the studio system, to the trailblazing directors of New Hollywood, to the contemporary world of franchises and streaming. By watching movies about movies, we will consider Hollywood as a land of both enchanting dreams and deadly nightmares, populated with forgotten film stars, maniacal directors, aspiring outsiders, and insufferable studio executives. In so doing, students will learn how to watch movies critically, considering their thematic content and their historical conditions of production, and gain an understanding of and appreciation for Hollywood’s history and its connection to American and global politics. Likely films include Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, The Player, and Mulholland Dr.
Why do the movies love the Victorians? Why does Dracula keep coming back to life on the silver screen? Why do we watch Lizzy Bennet saucily reject Mr. Darcy’s proposal again and again, and keep coming back for more? From Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, there is no shortage of nineteenth-century inspiration for modern box-office hits. What might these cinematic reimaginings of now classic stories tell us about our own time? In this course, we will read nineteenth-century novels alongside both twentieth-century and very recent film adaptations and explore how these two forms of media have engaged concerns that trouble Victorian and contemporary audiences alike: love and sex, race and gender, and immigration and imperialism. We will hone our interpretive, close reading skills by examining how movies use cinematic tools to interpret literature and tell stories—and by creating short adaptations of our own.
What does poetry have to say about the history of sexuality? How do queer voices, expansively defined, disrupt poetic norms and forms? How has poetry been congenial to the project of imagining and making queer communities, queer spaces, and even queer worlds? In this course, we survey the work of queer American poets from the late nineteenth century to the present, as we touch on major topics in the history of sexuality, queer studies, and American cultural history. This course provides an overview of American poetry as well as an introduction to queer studies concepts and frameworks; no prior experience with these fields is necessary.
This course is intended to provide students with the tools of critical film analysis. Through readings of images and sounds, sections of films and entire narratives, students will cultivate the habits of critical viewing and establish a foundation for focused work in film studies. The course introduces formal and technical units of cinematic meaning and categories of genre and history that add up to the experiences and meanings we call cinema. Although much of the course material will focus on the Hollywood style of film, examples will be drawn from the history of cinema. Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory.
This course introduces students to one possible history of global cinema. We will discuss and analyze a variety of filmmakers and film movements from around the world. Students will be exposed to the discipline of film studies as it is specifically related to the cinema of East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. We will study these works with special emphasis on film language, aesthetics, and politics, as well as film style and genre. Along the way, we will explore a number of key terms and concepts, including colonialism, postcolonialism, form, realism, surrealism, futurism, orientalism, modernity, postmodernity, hegemony, the subaltern, and globalization. Filmmakers will include, among others, Wong Kar-wai, Satyajit Ray, Shirin Neshat, Fernando Mereilles, Agnès Varda, and Werner Herzog.
ENGL B215EARLY MODERN CRIME NARRATIVES: VICE, VILLAINS, AND LAW1.0
This course taps into our continuing collective obsession with criminality, unpacking the complicated web of feelings attached to crime and punishment through early modern literary treatments of villains, scoundrels, predators, pimps, witches, king-killers, poisoners, mobs, and adulterers. By reading literary accounts of vice alongside contemporary and historical theories of criminal justice, we will chart the deep history of criminology and track competing ideas about punishment and the criminal mind. This course pays particular attention the ways that people in this historical moment mapped criminality onto dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, disability, religion, and mental illness according to cultural conventions very different from our own. Authors may include Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, and Behn.
This course explores how Latina/o writers fashion bicultural and transnational identities and narrate the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America. We will focus on topics of shared concern among Latino groups such as struggles for social justice, the damaging effects of machismo and racial hierarchies, the politics of Spanglish, and the affective experience of migration. By analyzing a range of cultural production, including novels, poetry, testimonial narratives, films, activist art, and essays, we will unpack the complexity of Latinidad in the Americas.
ENGL B223THE HELP: ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE & CARE WORK1.0
This course surveys Asian American literature and cultural productions that feature the work of care: jobs, whether official or unofficial (such as mothering, nursing, and nannying) that are essential, yet so often undercompensated and overlooked. We will examine how Asian American immigration history has led to the burgeoning of industries around care work. We will see how narrative and fiction portray the troubling entanglements between economic structures, race and gender roles, and personal feeling in the labor of care. This course operates under the premise that an attentiveness to how care unfolds is essential to creating a more just world. Collectively, we will not just talk about care as an abstract set of ideas but concretely practice it with one another in the space of our classroom.
Everyone knows that Shakespeare’s plays are chock-full of moments of gender trouble. Whether it is the fact of cross-dressing on stages that prohibited women actors or the episodes where already cross-dressed boy actors played men, the early modern stage reveled in the instability of gender and its performance. Less known, however, are the rich debates and theories about sex, gender, and sexuality that were going on at the time and that informed the performance of gender on Shakespeare’s stage. Indeed, three years before the publication of Shakespeare’s first folio, or collected works, a pamphlet debate between Hic Mulier (the man-woman) and Haec Vir (the womanish man) raged, bringing social anxieties about cross-dressing, sexuality, women, and masculinity to the fore of bookstall debate. This course will delve into Shakespeare’s works and put them in context in the landscape of early modern theories of gender and sexuality. Moreover, this course will engage contemporary scholarship, to re-situate our approach to gender and sexuality in Shakespeare within a trans-critical framework, moving away from gender binarism in our approach to questions of gender in early modern literature. Readings include Ben Jonson’s Epicene, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merchant of Venice, and Henry VI Part I, and a selection of criticism and theory.
Since the first nuclear explosions rocked the world in 1945, from the Indigenous lands of New Mexico to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, literature and film have had to reckon with the fact that the potential destructions of the literary archive—not to mention the world itself—no longer required divine intervention or literary speculation: apocalypse had moved from the realm of fiction to the realm of fact. Since that day, fiction and film have explored the impact these weapons have had on politics, the environment, and billions of lifeforms, human and nonhuman alike. By reading such works, we’ll consider the nuclear not only as an isolated event but as a continuous process, from the extraction of uranium on Indigenous lands, to production and testing, to the accumulation of nuclear materials and waste. We’ll also explore how novels and films have had to contort their forms to properly represent the time-bending reality of the bomb, by looking at Indigenous novels from both the Americas and the Pacific, Japanese historical fiction and monster movies, major Hollywood productions, Soviet cinema, and postmodern fiction. Students will leave the class with a sense of the nuclear issue’s past and ongoing importance while practicing and learning literary and film analysis. Likely authors include Masuji Ibuse, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Albert Wendt, and likely films include Godzilla, Hiroshima mon amour, Oppenheimer, Stalker, and footage of nuclear testing itself.
How has cinema visualized monsters, death, spectral presences, and all that is beyond human comprehension? How (and why) has it sought to elicit fear, revulsion, and horror from its viewers? In this class, we’ll explore these and other questions through a broad survey of the horror film across cinematic history. We’ll consider a wide range of films and subgenres, including gothic silent films, “golden age” monster movies, 80s slasher films, and found footage horror. We’ll also watch contemporary examples of how filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Matt Farley have used the horror genre to produce independent, original, and critically acclaimed movies in an era dominated by franchises and high budgets. We’ll pay particular attention to how the vampires, zombies, killers, and victims of horror are racialized, gendered, and classed, showing us how horror seeks (and often fails) to contain societal fears and anxieties within the realm of the fantastic. Likely films will include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Night of the Living Dead, Get Out, and A Girl Walks Home at Night, among others. This course presumes no prior knowledge of film studies, and we’ll read film criticism and scholarship to learn how to think, talk, and write about movies generally and horror films specifically. CW: Given the subject of the course, we will be watching a number of films that include disturbing or frightening imagery or themes. That said, the professor will happily provide content warnings on specific topics or themes if desired.
ENGL B237CULTURAL MEMORY AND STATE-SANCTIONED VIOLENCE IN LATINX LITERATURE1.0
This course examines how Latinx literature grapples with state-sanctioned violence, cultural memory, and struggles for justice in the Americas. Attending to the histories of dictatorship and civil war in Central and South America, we will focus on a range of genres—including novels, memoir, poetry, film, and murals—to explore how memory and the imagination can contest state-sanctioned violence, how torture and disappearances haunt the present, how hetereopatriarchal and white supremacist discourses are embedded in authoritarian regimes, and how U.S. imperialism has impacted undocumented migration. Throughout the course we will analyze the various creative techniques Latinx cultural producers use to resist violence and imagine justice.
This course surveys contemporary trans-authored fiction, poetry, and life-writing to consider the question: what makes “trans literature” trans? By reading a broad variety of genres alongside trans literary criticism, we will explore formal, generic, and political strategies of trans authorship, including self-publication and re-publication, radically fictionalized memoirs, and dysphoric body horror. We will study how trans authors engage and respond to dominant characterizations of transness, like “born in the wrong body” narratives or bio-essentialist understandings of transition, and investigate how literature might offer a venue for creating new kinds of trans experiences. Examining trans representations of messy, fanciful, and sensational trans stories, this course pays particular attention to the contemporary political and theoretical context and implications of North American trans literature, probing the limits of literary visibility.
ENGL B261COLONIZING GIRLHOODS: L.M.MONTGOMERY AND LAURA INGALLS WILDE1.0
This class explores what we can see anew when we juxtapose two iconic figures of North American children’s literature: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fictionalized self-portrait, Laura Ingalls. Both characters have risen to mythic proportions in their respective countries, and are powerful signs in an international culture industry. After setting up key eighteenth-century concepts and contexts for what French historian Philippe Ariès calls the "invention of childhood”, we will explore the ways in which images of young girls have been deployed as the benign faces of ruthless imperialism, reading through the entirety of each original series. We will track the geographical movement of both heroines, with particular attention to different spatial narratives of nationhood and empire-building, whether manifest destiny in the U.S., or what critic Northrop Frye has termed the “garrison mentality” of Canadian culture. Here we’ll be especially attentive to commonalities in how both authors produce class-stratified and racialized notions of girlhood, as well as divergences in how both countries, each still framed to varying degrees as the “infant nation” of Great Britain, yield new and evolving discourses of girlhood.
Oscar Wilde embodied contradictions. He was an Irishman who embraced English life, a husband to a woman and a lover to many men, an author who wrote in all genres, a celebrity, a wit, a journalist and editor, a socialist and a decadent, a beloved and loathed exile and martyr. At his height, he was one of the most celebrated writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and he played a huge role in the shaping of the literary and cultural aesthetics of the 1890s. Then, after a brutal and sensational trial for “acts of gross indecency” with men, followed by 2 years in a prison cell, he became a byword for homosexuality and its perils. Everyone knew, or knew about, Oscar. This course will trace his artistic and sexual networks, his friendships, his rivalries, and his afterlives. Topics will include: Wilde, feminism and fashion; Wilde, aestheticism and America; Wilde and incarceration; Wilde and race. Alongside selections from his drama, poetry, essays and fiction, we will read work by the women who formed part of his literary circle (Ouida, Amy Levy, Michael Field), the sexual philosophers who influenced or were influenced by him (Walter Pater, Aleister Crowley, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter), and learn why Henry James was an enemy, and Lord Alfred Douglas a very bad boyfriend indeed.
Our contemporary world contains a seemingly endless amount of images, from television and cinema to the jpegs, gifs, and memes of social media and the internet, but this was not always the case. This class will consider how theorists and philosophers reckoned with the rise of the image and the birth of “image culture.” What exactly is an image? What happens when an image can be reproduced and disseminated at unimagined speeds? What happens when that image moves? What sort of gazes does the image produce, and what are the social and political power of such gazes? We will pay particular attention to how the invention of cinema changed the meaning of the image at the end of the 19th century and how, in turn, the end of World War II (with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the discovery of the Nazi’s extermination camps) challenged the meaning of cinema, undermining its supposed ability to show us what was “real.” In asking these and related questions, this course will provide students with a robust understanding of film theory and of different theoretical and historical approaches to the image. We will consider a wide range of methods—including Marxism, critical race theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis—and view a number of photographic, cinematic, and digital images against which we can test these theories. Fulfills Film Studies Theory course requirement
ENGL B270AMERICAN GIRL: CHILDHOOD IN U.S. LITERATURES, 1690-19351.0
Long before the “American Girl” dolls debuted in 1986, the “girl” (and what is a “girl?”) served as a particularly potent figure of cultural fantasy. The vexed and contradictory question of what it means to be “American” has been played out over and over again through fictions of girlhood. This course looks at those fictions, from the 1770s through the 1910s – from the founding of the nation to suffrage. While real girls and women suffered and disappeared behind the laws of coverture and enslavement, fictional girls had gripping adventures in the pages of American novels, adventures that insisted that the growing up of a female child was the best story for tracing what it means to be free, to be good, to be self-determining. Focusing on questions of race, gender and sexuality, we will read, among other texts, Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Alcott’s Little Women, and Zitkala-Sa’s Impressions of an Indian Childhood.
ENGL B271TRANSATLANTIC CHILDHOODS IN THE 19TH CENTURY1.0
This class explores what we can see anew when we juxtapose American and British experiences of, and responses to, emergent ideas and ideals of childhood in the child-obsessed nineteenth century. After setting up key eighteenth-century concepts and contexts for what French historian Philippe Ariès called the "invention of childhood," we'll explore the ways in which children came to be defined between 1800 and 1900, in relation to such categories as law, labor, education, sex, play, and psychology, through examinations of both "literary" works and texts and artifacts from a range of other discourses and spheres. We'll move between American and British examples, aiming to track the commonalities at work in the two nations and the effects of marked structural differences. Here we'll be especially attentive to chattel slavery in the U.S., and to the relations, and non-relations, between the racialized notions of childhood produced in this country and those which arise out of Britain's sharply stratified class landscape. If race and class are produced differently, we'll also consider the degree to which British and American histories and representations of boyhood and girlhood converge and diverge across the period. We’ll close with reflections on the ways in which a range of literary genres on the cusp of modernism form themselves in and through the new discourses of childhood and evolving figures of the child.
This course will consider the deep histories of transgender embodiment by exploring literary, historical, medical, and religious texts from the Renaissance. Expect to read about alchemical hermaphrodites, gender-swapping angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, female husbands, trans saints, criminal transvestites, and genderqueer monks. We will consider together how these early modern texts speak to the historical, theoretical, and political concerns that animate contemporary trans studies. We will read texts by Crashaw, Donne, Shakespeare, Lyly, and Dekker as well as Susan Stryker, Dean Spade, Mel Chen, Paul Preciado, and Kadji Amin. Prerequisite: Students must have completed at least one 200-level class.
ENGL B330ADVENTURES IN MANY LANDS: GLOBAL VICTORIAN LITERATURES1.0
The nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of the British empire, creating faster and more intricate networks of transportation and exchange for goods, people, and ideas across the globe. For British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, these networks offered the opportunity for “strange and amusing adventures,” allowing a widowed Black woman to become, as she writes in her autobiography, “quite a female Ulysses.” Beginning with Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, we will investigate how movements generated by the British imperial project are narrated both by those embedded in its networks and by critics reading those accounts, from Jane Eyre’s globalized marriage economies to recent critical calls to “undiscipline” Victorian studies. Traversing literatures, life-writing, and literary criticism from the Caribbean, North America, South Asia, and United Kingdom, we will study the global exchange of social ideas of gender, race, and national identity alongside the material exchange of literature, goods, and labor. By reading diverse primary and critical accounts of immigration, import and export, missionary work, and marriage, we will contribute to the expanding geographic and critical bounds of Victorian studies while analyzing how empire shapes and is shaped by stories told by and about those within it.
Queer theory emerged in the early 90s as an academic field committed to studying queer experiences of gender, sexuality, and desire. Early queer theorists established the field’s opposition not just to heterosexual privilege, homophobia, and the normal but also to so-called proper objects of analysis and critique. In this class, we study the history, present, and future of this field, and we interrogate its power at a moment when some of its basic assertions are being disregarded and teachers in some states risk their jobs if they acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. Texts will include movement documents, manifestos, poems, artworks, and films in addition to works of theory by writers like Anzaldúa, Berlant, Butler, Ferguson, Halberstam, Love, Muñoz, Puar, Rubin, Sedgwick, Spillers, Warner, and others.
Lesbian literature has repeatedly figured itself in alliance with tropes of immortality and eternity. Using recent queer theory on temporality, and 19th and 20th century primary texts, we will explore topics such as: fame and noteriety; feminism and mythology; epistemes, erotics and sexual seasonality; the death drive and the uncanny; fin de siecle manias for mummies and seances.
Modernism is consistently aligned with innovation: making things new and making things strange. Yet modernist writing is preoccupied with habit, repetition, sameness, boredom, and the banal—with “things happening, normally, all the time,” as Virginia Woolf once put it. This course explores the modernist fascination with the ordinary, from the objects in a kitchen to the rhythms of a day. Our primary task will be to understand the stakes of paying attention to the ordinary world for queer and women modernist writers, whose work reveals the ordinary as a site of deep ambivalence as well as possibility. Likely authors include: Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys.
ENGL B339LATINA/O CULTURE AND THE ART OF MIGRATION1.0
Gloria Anzaldúa has famously described the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound and the border culture that arises from this fraught site as a third country. This course will explore how Chicana/os and Latina/os creatively represent different kinds of migrations across geo-political borders and between cultural traditions to forge transnational identities and communities. We will use cultural production as a lens for understanding how citizenship status, class, gender, race, and language shape the experiences of Latin American migrants and their Latina/o children. We will also analyze alternative metaphors and discourses of resistance that challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric and reimagine the place of undocumented migrants and Latina/os in contemporary U.S. society. Over the course of the semester, we will probe the role that literature, art, film, and music can play in the struggle for migrants’ rights and minority civil rights, querying how the imagination and aesthetics can contribute to social justice. We will examine a number of different genres, as well as read and apply key theoretical texts on the borderlands and undocumented migration.
ENGL B340IRANIAN CINEMA: BEFORE AND AFTER THE REVOLUTION1.0
One of the most celebrated global cinemas to date, Iranian cinema has been recognized in film festivals around the world for its unique aesthetic vision, political complexities, and social import. This course will expose students to major masterpieces of Iranian cinema both prior to and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Along the way, students will learn to meaningfully engage topics such as film form, colonialism, imperialism, labor migration, realism, expressionism, and issues concerning the politics of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.
ENGL B341MARRIAGE/PLOTS: IDENTITY AND THE NOVEL1.0
This course explores how strategies of characterization, genre, and the novel form work together to construct characters who seem like real people—or perhaps, how these literary tools make people seem like characters. Taking the nineteenth-century marriage plot as our object, we will study the formal construction of identity through narrative techniques of characterization: how might the forgone conclusion of a “marriage plot” shape literary and social understandings of the individual self, and of desire, gender, and reproduction more broadly? What happens to a novel, and to us the readers, when we resist the teleological pull of the marriage plot? We will encounter mistaken identities, group-thinking narrators, queer triads, and quite a few cases of being left at the altar. Alongside marriage and anti-marriage plots, we will read feminist, queer, and trans theories of identity to help us account for the consolidation and dissolution of humanist subjecthood.
This course examines medieval queer history, focusing on literary depictions of non-normative sexual identities and expressions. From monastic vows of celibacy to same-sex erotic love, from constructions of female virginity to trans identity, the Middle Ages conceptualized sexuality in a range of ways and with a range of attached assumptions and anxieties. Readings will include chivalric romance, rules for monks, cross-dressing saints' lives, and legal tracts worried about unmarried women.
ENGL B343SEX, SIN, AND THE SACRED IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE1.0
Rather than being at odds with the church, sex and sexuality was an integral part of medieval concepts of sanctity. Even as the church attempted to regulate sexual behavior, it was also deeply invested in the relationship between the divine and the corporeal, including meditation upon the frankly erotic Song of Songs; the question of Mary’s virginity and motherhood; hagiographic accounts of cross-dressing saints; and the feminization of Christ’s body. This course will explore three concepts-- sex, sin, and the sacred-- and their interrelationship during the medieval period. We will investigate the complex and often contradictory ways that sex was understood, exploring how medieval people conceptualized the sacred and profane -- and then troubled the very binaries such a system established. Broadly interpreting the term “sex,” we will explore issues of sexual and romantic desire; sexual acts and behaviors; medieval versions of gender identity; pre-modern understandings of “biological” sex; love and courtship; and more. Readings will be mostly literary (both canonical and non-canonical) but will also include some excerpts from religious texts and both medieval and early modern medical treatises, including work from Geoffrey Chaucer, Alain de Lille, Christine de Pizan, St. Augustine, Margery Kempe, Thomas Mallory, John Gower, and Marie de France. We will pair these primary source texts with commentary and essays from critics such as Judith Butler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Mills, and Carolyn Dinshaw. While texts will be presented in their original form where possible, knowledge of Middle English is not a prerequisite for the course. Prerequisite: One 200-level English course or permission of instructor
In My Emily Dickinson, poet Susan Howe names Gertrude Stein and Dickinson as “two writers whose work refuses to conform to the Anglo-American literary traditions” upheld in university libraries. Stein, a lesbian writing in Paris in the early twentieth century, and Dickinson, an unmarried woman writing in New England in the mid to late nineteenth, are two of the most important—mythologized, ridiculed, and misunderstood—writers in American literary history. In this course, we read this pair of radical writers in conversation, using theory and biography to understand their contributions to modern literature and culture.
How have Black feminist authors and traditions theorized or represented the ecological world and their relationship to it? How does thinking intersectionally about gender(ing) and racialization expand or challenge conventional notions of “nature,” conservation, or environmental justice? In what ways does centering racial blackness critically reframe a host of practical and philosophical questions historically brought together under the sign “ecofeminism?” Combining history and theory, the humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary course will use the work of Black feminist writers (broadly defined) across a range of genres to approach and to trouble the major paradigms and problems of contemporary Euro-American ecofeminist thought. The course uses fiction and poetry by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen as a gateway to a range of critical work by Jennifer Morgan, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Mies, and Val Plumwood as it attempts to define and deconstruct what Chelsea Frazier calls “Black Feminist Ecological Thought.”
