174 courses with the subject ENGL, 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 001CWriting Pedagogy1
(Cross-listed as EDUC 001C ) This seminar serves as the gateway into the Writing Associates Fellowship Program (WAs). Students are introduced to the theory and pedagogy of composition studies and the concept of reflective practice. The seminar asks students to connect theory with practical experience when assessing how best to engage with different student writers and different forms of academic prose. Open only to those selected as Writing Associates. Meets distribution requirements but does not count toward the major. Graded CR/NC. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Newmann Holmes.
Students currently enrolled or have completed an academic writing course, in consultation with the professor of these courses, may enroll in the tutorial. Students will set up an individual program to work with the professor on writing for the course or other courses. Humanities. 0.5 credit.
ENGL 001FFirst-Year Seminar: Transitions to College Writing1
This class introduces students to the different genres of writing required at the College. Through assignments and class readings students learn what they might need to transition from writing in high school to writing at Swarthmore. Meets distribution requirements but does not count toward the major. Students may take ENGL 001F and an English Literature first-year seminar (ENGL 008 A-Z and 009A-Z). Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Bragg, Mera Ford, Mishra.
Written genres both respond to and structure a writer’s experience of audience, purpose, structure, style, and voice. This course aims to teach students how an understanding of genres (as an organizing principle of disciplinary ways of inventing, writing, and thinking) can not only improve academic writing, but can also make evident the tacit knowledge and skills required to join different discourse communities. Together, we will investigate the values at work within communities that shape genre expectations. We will also explore the rhetorical work of genres-allowing us to reach audiences within and outside of academe. With this rhetorical work in mind, each semester, the course may pursue a theme, such as Genres of Dissent, Genres of Discovery, or Voice and Genre. Contact the instructor for theme details. This course is open to all students and offers an opportunity to develop skills as college writers. Through frequent practice, class discussions, and in-class activities, students will become familiar with all aspects of the writing process and will develop their ability to write academically. Humanities Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 001HResearch and Writing Across the Disciplines1
This course explores how research generates and is integrated into your writing. Together, we will investigate the scholarly and rhetorical strategies that shape academic inquiry. Students will undertake research and writing projects that draw upon qualitative, quantitative, and textual research traditions, with special emphasis on how research-based writing is organized and how students can effectively integrate outside scholarship into their own written projects. This course is open to all students, but especially well-suited to sophomores, transfer students, or first-year students seeking a more indepth exploration of academic writing. Through frequent practice, class discussions, and in-class activities, students will become familiar with all aspects of the writing process and will develop their ability to write for academic audiences. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
This course will ask students to explore the tools of oral and written persuasion across different academic and public discourse communities. Students will engage with such questions as: How do we listen and empathize with a diverse range of views in order to argue from one’s own position? How does the motivation “to persuade” shape a rhetorical situation? How has persuasion in rhetoric evolved from its historic to modern contexts? How do we use a range of resources, such as rhetorical traditions, genre knowledge, and multimodality, to speak to different audiences? Students will be able to critically examine how persuasion works in their own communications and the communications of others in real contexts. *The course might have a specific theme. Please check with the instructor for details. Humanities. Writing Course. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS.
English 2M is a Writing (W) course that introduces students to the fields of medical rhetoric and medical humanities as well as to typical genres of writing within contemporary medicine. By analyzing texts and narratives by physicians and other health professionals, we will identify and assess rhetorical strategies they use to address specialist and non-specialist audiences. By composing your own patient or witness narrative, you will develop effective techniques to engage both scholarly and public readers while dissecting sociopolitical contexts that inform healthcare communication globally. We will also explore pop culture representations of medical practitioners and (mal)practice to interrogate some of the dominant myths-perpetuated through visual, digital, and written media-that influence the rhetoric of health and medicine today. Humanities. Writing. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-Paired Catalog chapter: English Literature
ENGL 002VVisual Rhetorics and Multimodal Writing:Making arguments with image, text, and sound1
We live in visually-mediated times. The rhetorical power of images-to inform, persuade, and manipulate-is especially worthy of our attention as 21st-century writers. Increasingly, whether in the sciences, humanities, or in popular discourse, we are asked to create multimodal texts-that is, texts which combine visual, aural and alphabetic modes. In English 2V students will gain hands-on experience producing maps, video essays, and argument-driven essays for online audiences and analyzing multimodal arguments made by others. Students will revise projects in response to feedback from classmates, the professor, and other readers/audience members, and class time will be given to developing both traditional and multimodal writing processes. Humanities. Writing Course. 1 credit.
ENGL 002WWords Matter: Crafting and Critiquing Rhetorically Effective Styles1
What does it mean to write an awkward or a clear sentence? Who determines what counts as appropriate or “good” writing, and how are such notions of standardized English currently being challenged? Can a scholarly voice be an authentic personal voice, too? In this course, we will examine the grammatical building blocks of written style while scrutinizing larger cultural concerns about the effectiveness of distinct styles. While recognizing famous tenets of style in creative writing, we will primarily focus on stylistic features of academic, civic, and professional discourse. We will learn grammatical terminology and apply it in analyzing and evaluating the stylistic impact of a variety of passages while at the same time exploring the rhetorical contexts and sociopolitical implications of so-called norms for writing in English. Throughout, we will seek to equip you to make rhetorically savvy stylistic choices in your own writing for distinct purposes and audiences. Humanities. Writing Course. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Mera Ford.
ENGL 003AIndependent Study and Directed Reading in Writing Studies
Students who plan an independent study or a directed reading must consult with the appropriate instructor and submit a prospectus for such work before the beginning of the semester during which the study is actually done. The course is available only if a professor is free to supervise the project. Humanities. 0.5 or 1 credit.
An introduction to news gathering, news writing, and journalism ethics. Students learn the values, skills, and standards crucial to high-quality journalism. They write conventional news stories, narratives, profiles, non-deadline features, trend stories, and point-of-view articles on a beat of their choosing. Guest speakers include award-winning reporters and editors. This course counts towards a degree program in English Literature and as a writing (W) course. This course is open to first year students. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 006Investigative Journalism as an Agent of Social Change1
This course examines the role that investigative journalism has played and continues to play as an agent of change in American society, as a defender of democratic values, and a promoter of social equity. It examines the historical role of investigative journalism in realms as diverse as civil rights, poverty, product safety, corporate malfeasance, and public corruption. Students read a diverse array of texts by authors such as Michiko Kakutani, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Copeland, Woody Klein, Isabel Wilkerson, Kate Boo, Seymour Hersh, and Sari Horwitz. Guest speakers will include veteran journalists and those newer to the field. The course will be conducted as a seminar limited to fifteen students. Humanities. 1 credit.
This is a hybrid course intended both for students considering going into the field of journalism, as well as those interested in understanding more about the profession and its role in a democracy. It is a course that will combine the teaching of journalistic skills and principles - interviewing techniques, story structure, working with documents, multi-platform story-telling, emerging technologies (video, audio, geotagging, Data Viz, etc.) - as well as ethics, considerations of balance and objectivity, the changing media landscape, and the impact of disinformation. It will be a kind of journalistic sampler that will explore hard news stories, features, profiles, editorials, investigative stories, international reporting, environmental journalism and long-form stories. Students will be encouraged to pursue their own disciplinary interests (science, medicine, diversity, justice, politics, etc.) through the prism of journalism. The objective of the class is to immerse students in the complex and diverse world of the working journalist, as well as to produce more savvy and critical consumers of the news. Class size is limited to fifteen and will be conducted as a seminar. Outside journalists and media scholars will be invited to speak to the class. There is also the possibility of a field trip or two. Class will meet twice weekly Humanities
ENGL 006CInvestigative Journalism Beyond the Classroom1
The course will examine the tradition, techniques, and tools of investigative reporting, in terms of both its importance to democracy and its practice in the field. Students will analyze prize-winning investigative stories (Pulitzer, Polk, and Shorenstein, for example) and complete projects of their own in two or three-person teams. This course will also look beyond the strict confines of conventional print journalism with an eye to multi-media reporting (radio and other audio media, video, data visualization, etc.). Guest speakers for this course will include working professionals with expertise in journalism across media. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students with prior journalistic experience or coursework are especially welcome. Class size is limited to 15. Humanities. 1 credit.
In this course we will explore the forms law and literature take as they work through similar concerns, determining how social systems should function and puzzling over the moments when they don’t. When does fiction appropriate the law’s penchant for articulating rights and defining relationships? And when does the legal imagination draw from literature? We will read works of tragedy, detection, confession and evasion as we sort through these questions, supplementing our conversation with critical legal theory, trauma studies, and case law. Writing Course. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Spring 2028 Patnaik.
ENGL 009CFirst-Year Seminar: Why College? The Past and Future of Liberal Arts1
Cross-listed as EDUC 009C Look past the brochures and the info sessions and ask: what is college in the early 21st Century, how did it get that way? Why do people go to college? Should they? Students in this course will examine the history of higher education, and study controversies over the economics, mission, and values of colleges and universities as they appear in curricula, admissions and financial aid policies, student life, and more. Students will develop an understanding of the behind-the-scenes operations of higher education institutions like Swarthmore through reading, seminar discussion, visits from experts, and independent research. Humanities Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 009DFirst-Year Seminar: Nation and Migration1
Drawing on novels, short stories and film produced by immigrant writers from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, this course explores the ways in which identity and community is shaped in the modern world. How does the migrant/diasporic writer rewrite the English language to reflect questions of race and power, nationhood and citizenship, and histories of the past and present? Authors include Salman Rushdie, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Adichie, and Mohsin Hamid. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM.
ENGL 009EFirst-Year Seminar: Narcissus and the History of Reflection1
Narcissism seems at once reprehensible and an unavoidable part of personhood. This course investigates how, over the course of many centuries, the story of Narcissus has been reworked as a way to think about process of creative reflection and how we see ourselves in relation to others. At stake are questions of desire, gender, racial identities, and language. Authors include Ovid, Milton, Wilde, Freud, and Fanon; also visual art and film. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Song. Fall 2027 Song.
ENGL 009FFirst Year Seminar: Introduction to Latinx Literature and Culture1
(Cross-listed as SPAN 015 , LITR 015S , LALS 015 ) This course is an introduction to the writings of Latino/as in the U.S. with emphasis on the distinctions and similarities that have shaped the experiences and the cultural imagination among different Latino/a communities. We will focus particularly in works produced by the three major groups of U.S. Latino/as (Mexican Americans or Chicanos, Puerto Ricans or Nuyoricans, and Cuban Americans). By analyzing works from a range of genres including poetry, fiction, film, and performance, along with literary and cultural theory, the course will explore some of the major themes in the cultural production of these groups. Topics to be discussed include identity formation in terms of language, race, gender, sexuality, and class; diaspora and emigration; the marketing of the Latino/a identity; and activism through art. Taught in English. Writing Course. Humanities. Writing Course. 1 credit. Eligible for LALS, CPLT Fall 2026. Díaz.
This course covers a range of comic dramas and comic performances. It will introduce key theories about comedy as a genre and comic performance as a cultural practice. We will also work intensively on expository writing and revision. Likely texts include films, plays by Plautus, Shakespeare, Behn, Wilde, and Churchill; and materials on minstrelsy, genre theory, gender, and performance studies. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 009HFirst-Year Seminar: Portraits of the Artist1
We’ll study works portraying artists using a variety of media, including literature, film, song-writing, and digital animation. We’ll learn how to study artistic form, as well as different approaches to understanding a work’s content and context. Artists studied will include the following: Plato’s “Parable of the Cave” from The Republic, Tony Kushner’s 2-part play Angels in America; Carl Sagan’s novel Contact (about humankind’s first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization); short stories by Kafka, Borges, and Ted Chiang; songs from Barbie by Dua Lipa, Mark Ronson, and Billie Eilish; songs from Meshell Ndegeocello’s James Baldwin project; and 2 animated films, the first of which also features great songs: Maggie Kang’s and Chris Appelhans’ K-Pop Demon Hunters (Netflix 2025); plus ND Stevenson’s Nimona (Netflix 2023).
ENGL 009JFirst-Year Seminar: Revolution and Revolt1
What makes a revolution? This course investigates the literature of rebellion from the late 18th century’s “Age of Revolution” to the George Floyd rebellions. We will read the works of not only famous revolutionary leaders, but also infamous and obscure ones, including radical abolitionists, communists, anarchists, feminists, student activists, and more, asking how their writing interprets the memory of previous revolutions and imagines possibilities beyond them. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for PEAC, ESCH Spring 2027. Cohen.
Cross-listed as ENVS 045C “Natural history” is full of complicated stories of human beings in a larger-than-human world. This course invites students to build a creative community with one another and with the Crum Woods as they explore some of the various ways human beings have thought about and responded to “Nature.” Some class periods and much homework will take place in the Crum. Readings include contemporary poetry and natural history; student writing ranges from academic prose through creative nonfiction to poetry and digital storytelling. (Poets include Oliver, Mullen, Hillman, Heaney, Rich and others; essayists include Dillard, Pollan, Quammen, Sheldrake, Young.) Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS.
ENGL 009NFirst Year Seminar : Between Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction1
What makes a story true? What are the borders between memoir / creative nonfiction and fiction that draws from an author’s lived experiences, and how porous are these borders? When a memoirist includes dialogue from when they were eight years old, are we to assume that they are directly quoting an audio recording? When a novelist named, say, Moriel, centers a story around a novelist named Zoriel, are we to allow that every detail about this character is utterly imaginary? Put otherwise, why is it that when we read memoirs, we often ask, “Did this really happen?” and when we read fiction, we often ask, “How much of this is based on real life?” What impact does this border, between memoir and perhaps-autobiographical fiction, have on the real world? When is it useful, and when is it limiting? How can reading and writing fiction inform our creative nonfiction, and vice versa? How can fictionalizing a story increase its truthfulness? And how can faithfully retelling a true story be an act of deepest art [/artifice?] In this workshop, we will explore these questions and more, through close reading and in-class discussion, and through workshopping original student writing, both in the form of creative nonfiction / memoir, and in fiction. C/NC. Humanities 1 credit. Catalog chapter: English Literature
ENGL 009OFirst-Year Seminar: American Archipelagos1
This course will untether the term “America” from its all-too-easy connotation with the continental United States and set it adrift among the island formations comprising the western hemisphere and beyond. By accounting for the ocean as a crucial shaping force of human culture and survival, much in the same way that land has been understood, we will craft an archipelagic approach to our study of the Americas and, indeed, the globe. We will examine how colonial discourses and expansionist policies have attempted to construct islands as spaces to be governed, instrumentalized, and appropriated while at the same time immersing ourselves in literature and other forms of cultural production that imagine islands as portals towards more liberatory ways of belonging in this globe. By thinking with a variety of American Archipelagoes, students will come out of this course with a more nuanced grasp of the multi-racial, multi-lingual, and trans-imperial American oceanscape, as well as how the United States has drawn from it to take on its various, shifting forms. The course will commence with an in-depth study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and end with an exploration of contemporary literature by authors that may include Raquel Salas Rivera, Haunani-Kay Trask, Craig Santos Perez, and Tiphanie Yanique. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 009PFirst-Year Seminar: Refuge: Resettled in Philadelphia1
Cross-listed as ARAB 009P The number of individuals displaced by persecution, war, or climate, who then seek refuge in another place, continues to grow. This course will explore the theme of refuge broadly-to cover various political, institutional, and cultural understandings of the term-but will specifically focus on the experiences of Philadelphia’s Arabic-speaking community that has navigated the resettlement process. Students will analyze literature, artworks, films, and nonfiction texts that address the theme of refuge. We will explore broad topics such as: language, culture, and religion; race and ethnicity; war and militarism. Students will have the opportunity to collaborate directly with Philadelphia’s Arabic-speaking community through a series of artist-led workshops that will explore the idea of a “sticky family” that is formed beyond national and linguistic boundaries. These workshops will result in a professionally-illustrated comic book. This course is conducted in English. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ESCH. PEAC. GLBL-paired.
ENGL 009SFirst-Year Seminar: Black Liberty/Black Literature1
How have African American writers told stories of freedom, and how have they tried to tell them freely? How has the question of freedom shaped the development of, and debates over, an African American literary tradition? Drawing upon fiction, poetry, personal narratives, and critical essays, we will examine freedom as an ongoing problem of form, content, and context in black literature from antebellum slavery to the Harlem Renaissance. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST
ENGL 009TFYS: Transpacific Personalities: Asian American Literature and the Personal Essay1
This first-year seminar considers how the tension between subjectivity and collectivity has shaped Asian American literature and media since the 1970s. We will study the cultural significance of personal narration in our texts, asking how Asian American writers experiment with form to expand literary possibilities and challenge the racialized history of Asian American immigrant experience. Authors include Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Theresa Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Wilfrido Nolledo, and Elaine Castillo. Humanities. Writing Course. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Cañete Rodriguez Kelly.
The current moment in the U.S.-in some corners described as a “new Civil War”-has been traced to U.S. wars abroad-most notoriously, the Vietnam War-that, it is said, are finally coming home. As indicated by the metaphor the “new Civil War,” however, the conflicts coming to a head in the present point not only to the return of war to the homeland but also to the ways in which home, to begin with, is a place of war. This course charts the history of U.S. wars through literary and cultural texts to study not only the wages of armed conflict but also the constitutive role of organized violence in American culture. This “war culture” is often attributed to the American Revolution, but in fact the most enduring texts of the time emphasize ideas over violence while tackling the complexity of independence. We will follow the persistence of this intellectual and critical spirit in accounts of U.S. wars-from the Civil War to the two World Wars to the Vietnam War to the War on Terror-to study not only war itself but also the culture of which it is an index: the war beyond/before the war. In reading about war culture, we will also consider how it has been countered through writing to learn how to be better writers ourselves, in hopes that persuasive argumentation is an antidote to war. Readings may include the Declaration of Independence, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” American Revolution and Civil War poetry, The Unvanquished , Company K , “Hiroshima,” Comfort Woman , Apocalypse Now , We Should Never Meet , Night Sky with Exit Wounds , The Forever War , and The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War . Humanities Writing Course. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM, GLBL-paired, PEAC Catalog chapter: English Literature
We often think of literature and quantification as opposites, but in this class we will see how intertwined they can be. We will examine poets’ creative uses of numbers, see novelists work with algorithms, and learn how literary critics use computation to study literature. We will read poems, novels, and datasets; explore large corpora of texts using computational tools; and learn to ground arguments about literature in both quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence. We will also see how key literary studies concepts can help us understand technology and technological change. No prerequisites; no background in literature, computation, or quantitative reasoning required. Humanities. Writing Course. 1 credit.
ENGL 009YFirst-Year Seminar: Metropolitan Forms and Fictions1
Urban life is a definitive feature of modernity. As people moved into increasingly massive cities, basic ways of life changed: how people earned a living, what kinds of communities they formed, the gendered and sexual identities that became possible and legible, the spaces people inhabited and how they moved through them. Urban life, in turn, shaped literary expression. This course will examine modern and contemporary works about metropolitan experience, by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Mohsin Hamid, and N. K. Jemisin. Key topics include flânerie, anonymity, migrations, chance and repetition, and visibility and (dis)connection. As a first-year seminar, we will dedicate considerable attention to forming analytical arguments, practicing revision, and entering into scholarly conversations. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 009ZFirst-Year Seminar: Close Reading and Its Discontents1
What is close reading? How do we do it? What is its (unexpectedly complex) history? And what might it mean for us to reject it? We will study close readings of all kinds of text (from John Donne poems and Jane Austen novels to car advertisements and Tweets), practice traditional and experimental forms of close and distant reading, and write in several genres. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 010Monsters, Marvels, and Mysteries: Beowulf to Paradise Lost1
The first thousand years of English Literature with an emphasis on monsters like Grendel and Satan, marvels like a talking tree and a boy actor playing a woman pretending to be a man, and mysteries like the moth that devours words and a green knight who offers a hero the chance to chop off his head. Some modern retellings such as Gardner’s Grendel and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead will be included. Major authors include Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Med/Ren GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for MDST Fall 2026. Williamson. Fall 2027 Williamson.
The course covers a range of comic dramas and comic performances. It will introduce key theories about comedy as a genre and comic performance as a cultural practice. We will also work intensively on expository writing and revision. Likely texts include plays by Plautus, Shakespeare, Wilde, and Churchill, Hollywood romantic comedies, television comedy, and materials on minstrelsy, genre theory and performance studies. A version of this course has been offered in the past as a First-Year Seminar, English 009G, but this new version is open to any student, without any prerequisite. If you have taken English 009G, you are not able to enroll in English 011. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for FMST Fall 2026. Johnson. Spring 2027. Johnson.
This course surveys the dramatic genre of tragedy with some attention to the possibilities of tragedy in other genres or modes. We pair this dramatic and literary investigation with a survey of debates about what tragedy is or isn’t, and about its supposed aesthetic and cultural significance. We will pay attention to the modern claims made about ancient Greek drama as well as the curious position of early modern (or Renaissance) drama. Med/Ren. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as LING 014 ) A study of the origins and development of English-sound, syntax, and meaning-with an initial emphasis on learning Old English. Topics may include writing and speech, changing phonology and morphology, wordplay in Chaucer and Shakespeare, pidgins and creoles, and global English. Med/Ren. GATEWAY English Literature.
Topics in this survey of Shakespeare’s plays, include kingship, comedy and tragedy, family, sexuality, race, performance, language, and the rewriting of history. We will frequently return to the question of theater’s place in early modern England, while also examining the place Shakespeare holds in the cultures we inhabit. The list of plays may include Taming of the Shrew, Henry V, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, Lear , and The Tempest . Med/Ren GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Song.
This course pursues a particular line of thinking about race and Shakespearean drama. In previous decades, scholarship emphasized how modern categories of race had not yet taken root in Shakespearean England. More recently, scholars have discerned the relevance of race and racism in Shakespeare’s plays. This course considers how the meaning of blackness and anti-black racism on stage develops alongside the shifting relationship between religious belief and dramatic entertainment. Titus Andronicus , The Merchant of Venice , and Othello will be our main primary texts; supplemental readings from The Tempest and the Sonnets possible as time permits. Attention to criticism and performance & film history. Med/Ren. Humanities. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Johnson.
This course will begin with More’s Utopia and end with selections from Paradise Lost , paying particular attention to literature’s political contexts, gender, genre, and the relation of women’s writing to the male canon. Among the other writers included will be Wyatt, Surrey, Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert, Mary Wroth, Spenser, Elizabeth Cary, Jonson, Bacon, Donne, Herrick, George Herbert, and Marvell. Med/Ren. Humanities. 1 credit.
The study of sexuality allows us to pose some of the richest historical questions we can ask about subjectivity, the natural, the public, and the private. This course will explore such questions in early modern England, examining several sexual categories (the homoerotic, chastity and friendship, marriage, adultery, and incest) in a range of literary and secondary texts. Med/Ren Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST
This course traces how English writers anticipated, participated in, and made sense of the civil wars that led to the execution of Charles I (1649) and a failed attempt at non-monarchical government (1649-1660). Authors include William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Aphra Behn, as well as less familiar but important writers of both imaginative texts and polemics. Med/Ren. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 025Christopher Marlowe: Works, Life, and Afterlives1
Marlowe’s writing career was brief (cut short by his murder at the age of twenty nine) but made a lasting impression on English poetry and drama. This course offers a comprehensive overview of Marlowe’s literary output and samples some contemporaneous writings influenced by his work. This semester-long study will be enhanced by attention to Marlowe’s mysterious biography, which has generated questions about his religious belief (or putative atheism), political allegiances (and activity as a spy), and sexuality. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 026Allegory and Allegoresis in the English Renaissance1
Allegory designates a mode of writing and of interpreting narratives. The decline of allegory marks a shift from medieval to modern culture, eventually giving way to realism. Yet allegory has never left us, as we continue to read allegorically to some degree. This course turns to the English Renaissance as a literary turning point. Readings from The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Pilgrim’s Progress; theoretical work by Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and others. Med/Ren Humanities. 1 credit.
The memory of Elizabeth I still looms large on both sides of the Atlantic. We continue to generate and circulate depictions of the Queen who remained unmarried, ruled England during a decisive and turbulent time of national development, and died heirless. In this course, we revisit sixteenth-century England to examine the interlace between Elizabeth’s private life and the political mythology built around her during her long rule. Although we will attempt to be as historically accurate as possible, the basic premise of this course is that political realities, artistic representations, and intimate concerns are so intertwined around Elizabeth as to be inseparable. We will study a wide range of texts and materials, including Elizabeth’s own writings, drama, poetry, paintings, and clothing. Key topics include early modern (and modern) theories of political sovereignty, religious conflict at home and abroad, Petrarchism, early exploits in the New World, and gender. Med/Ren Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 027BPerforming Justice on the Renaissance Stage1
Courtroom spectacles-tragic injustices or the satisfying punishment of villains-have become familiar sources of entertainment. This course will examine how Shakespeare, Jonson, and their contemporaries turn repeatedly to the law for dramatic energy. Their plays compel a number of questions: what does it mean to take pleasure in injustice? What is the relationship between human and divine justice? These questions often demand historical answers, and our class will examine how dramatic works think through specific developments in legal thinking and practice. Med/Ren Humanities. 1 credit.
Intensive study of one of the most influential writers in English literary history. Units on: Milton’s early poetry; political writings during the Civil Wars and the experiment in non-monarchical government; and major later works, with special emphasis on the epic Paradise Lost . Overarching topics include the relationship between Christian belief and classical mythology, contested gender norms, and liberty as a religious and political concept. Med/Ren Humanities. 1 credit.
Depictions of body size in early modern England could be connected to ideas about social cohesion and differences in wealth, gender, religion, and sexuality, among other considerations. This course will look closely at some of those representations, especially in Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama, in relation to the widespread present-day obsession with bodily regulation and control of body size. The course will be taught from the perspective of conscious respect for bodily diversity. We’ll look at plays like Bartholomew Fair , A Chaste Maid at Cheapside , and Comedy of Errors, considering representations of hunger, “excess,” and pleasure in the context of larger social forces. Med/Ren Humanities. 1 credit.
“The essential claim of sublime is that man[sic] can, in speech and feeling, transcend the human” (Weiskel). What does this transcendence look like? How is it achieved? What resources does it offer us, and at what cost? Authors include Burke, Blake, the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST
Why do we read novels? How has the history of novel-reading shaped the way we think about ourselves, about other people, and about the world? In answering these questions, we will study the long history of the novel in English considered as an aesthetic and material form, as a record of social life, and as a way of imagining other possible worlds. We will begin in the eighteenth century, travelling through the novel’s Victorian and Modernist incarnations and its post-colonial and post-modernist reconfigurations to end in the present. Includes close attention to major canonical novels and authors, a survey of the main critical and theoretical approaches to the novel, strategies for close reading and interpretation, introductory text-mining techniques, and investigation of how novels were printed and circulated. Recommended for anyone interested in reading, writing, or reviewing novels. 18th/19th c. or 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST, INTP Fall 2026. Buurma. Fall 2027 Buurma.
Mingling stylistic precision with an uncanny eye for social foibles, Austen’s novels off a useful entry point into the study of literature and the ways literature reflects and refracts social conditions. We’ll read Austen’s major novels along with the 18th-century fiction, politics, and philosophy to which she was responding; we’ll also consider recent critical views on Austen and the ways films of the1990s through the present engaged Austen’s style and social critique. At the same time, students will engage the genre of the academic essay by writing and revising several kinds of literary essays: close readings; analysis of a novel’s use of source material or a film’s use of addressing one or more of the novels in a broader historical or stylistic context. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST
In the last decades of the 19 th century, British society perceived upheavals: rapid colonial expansion, new scientific theories and fields (such as Darwinism, psychology, sexology), the phenomenon of the New Woman, and fears about degeneration at the fin de siècle . At the same time, visual technologies were altering the idea of realism: photography became widespread and cinema came into being. In the artistic world, the Aesthetic and Decadent movements explored what can and cannot be made visible. This course explores how the late Victorians thought about visuality in an era of anxious change. We will study texts that engage with visibility and visual practices, paying attention to photography and painting as well as exhibition catalogs of the British empire, advertising, and periodical illustrations. Authors likely to include: Arthur Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee, Charlotte Mew, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit.
Skepticism and critique, rather than prophecy and transformation, are the common threads linking the “second-generation Romantics”: writers like Jane Austen, Byron, and the Shelleys. Indeed, Regency writers, pursuing formal and psychological integrity within a period of complex social changes, transform a certain wry cynicism into both an art form and a tool of inquiry. We’ll explore the different visions of power at work in such diverse texts as Austen’s Emma , Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” as well as parts of Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci , Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , and Byron’s Don Juan . To see the relevance of regency skepticism today, we’ll close the semester with a reading of the Romanticist anti-hero of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace . At the same time as we dwell on the textual choices of these fabulous writers, students will explore their own writing process, developing strategies to help them create more nuanced, unified, and sophisticated written arguments. 18th/19th c. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
ENGL 040Victorian Literature and Victorian Informatics1
A broad survey of canonical Victorian literature, including Charlotte Brontë, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, and others. This class focuses on developing techniques of close, middle-distance, and distant reading, with an emphasis on exploring digital tools for organizing, curating, decompasing, and remaking literary texts, including some treatment of theories of knowledge organization and literary histories of information. Pre-1830 or 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 041The Victorian Poets: Eminence and Decadence1
From Tennyson’s mythic moralizing to Robert Browning’s vivid ventriloquism, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sharp-eyed social commentary to Oscar Wilde’s tragic outrageousness, from the “fleshly school” of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the provocative nonsense of Lewis Carroll, this course examines the responses of Victorian poets to the stresses peculiar to their era. 18th/19th c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit.
The nineteenth-century ghost story, weird tale, and horror novel let Victorian writers escape the strictures of realism to express new perspectives on questions of class, gender, sexuality, science and technology, empire, race, psychology, and religion. Supernatural topics allowed writers to experiment with narrative forms, inhabit non-human perspectives, imagine new technologies (automatic writing, telecommunications), question social norms, and test alternative ways of knowing. We will read works by both canonical and less-known authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Rhoda Broughton, Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, Catherine Crowe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edith Nesbit, Margaret Oliphant and Bram Stoker, as well as journalistic and scientific investigations into supernatural phenomena and spiritualist practices like ghost hunting, seances, and telepathy. No prerequisites. Fulfills the 18th/19th c requirement for English majors. Humanities 1 credit Spring 2028 Buurma. Catalog chapter: Ennglish Literature
Virginia Woolf claimed that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” This famous provocation links literary character to forms of human subjectivity that are historically contingent. In this course, we will explore how novelists in the Victorian era crafted characters and what these literary creations express about human experience, social connection, and practices of narration. Novelists are likely to include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, among others. We will also read selections from scholars and novelists who theorize the notion of literary character. Humanities 1 credit
Steven Spender called Modern poets “recognizers,” creating a complex, fractured art out of circumstances they experienced as extraordinary, unprecedented. This course examines the responses of British male and female poets (and some American expatriates) to the wars, shifting beliefs, complicated gender roles, and other dislocations of early 20th century life. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 046Tolkien and Pullman and Their Literary Roots1
A study of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Pullman’s His Dark Materials in the context of their early English sources. For Tolkien, this will include Beowulf , Old English riddles and elegies, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . For Pullman, this will include Biblical stories of the Creation and Fall, Milton’s Paradise Lost , and selected Blake poems. Some film versions will be included. Med/Ren or 20th/21st. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for MDST, CPLT Spring 2027. Williamson. Spring 2028 Williamson.
Cross-listed as ASAM 047A Asians resurface in U.S. national culture from time to time, remembered anew amid perennial forgetting. To what extent does this (in)visibility betray a constitutive role in history? Through literary and cultural texts as well as ethnic historiography and criticism, this course charts the shifting place of Asians in modern America-as activists, transnational holders of capital, immigrants, family members, coolies, migrant laborers, colonized “nationals,” “internees,” refugees, diasporic/hybrid/futuristic subjects of color, alien suspects, and artists-by examining im/migration, empire’s wars, and the interracial future/diaspora. In providing a critical history of Asian America, this course expands the foundational concerns of Asian American studies as a field toward a transpacific and continental Asia/America while exploring minor adoptions of and resistances to Western politics, economics, and aesthetics. Readings may include Crazy Rich Asians , The Year of the Dragon , Philippine-American War political cartoons, America is in the Heart , Obasan , Dictee , Night Sky with Exit Wounds , Tropic of Orange , Homeland Elegies , The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On , Everything Everywhere All at Once , Immigrant Acts , Compositional Subjects , Coolies and Cane , Impossible Subjects , The Oriental Obscene , Partly Colored , Alien Capital , and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation . This course may be combined with another in the 47 series into an Honors Preparation course (pending instructor approval). 20th/21st c.
At least one W course. Recommended before or while taking the course: HIST 05B or HIST 010. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA, CPLT, GLBL-paired. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 047BAsian American War Literature1
(Cross-listed as ASAM 047B ) Asian Americans are typically studied in terms of immigration, empire, and race. America’s long history of wars in Asia and the workings of racialization within the nation as social war intimate another story. A major pathway for Asians to America and a hallmark of life in Asian America, war underlies the ways that Asians have been known in America. This course centers war in Asian American studies to (re)discover the histories that remain buried so long as only the manifestations, but not the condition, of Asian American identity and of U.S. nationhood are tackled. Examining Asian/American wars in reverse chronological order-from the War on Terror to the Vietnam War to the Korean War to World War II in the Pacific to the Philippine-American War-this course excavates the layers of the “forgotten” and repetitive history of Asian/American modernity through literature. In the process, we will explore the relation between history and literature, event and perspective, forgetting and repetition, and representation and (the) reality (of war). Readings may include The Reluctant Fundamentalist , The Sympathizer , Yellow Rain , DMZ Colony , The Guest , Camp Notes , But For the Lovers , Insurrecto , and The Manchurian Candidate . This course may be combined with ENGL 047A into an Honors Preparation course (pending instructor approval). 20th/21st c.
At least one W course. Recommended before taking the course: ENGL 009W or ENGL 047A. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA, CPLT, GLBL-Paired, PEAC. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 047CAsian American Gender/Sexuality/Species1
Cross-listed as ASAM 047C . Asian Americans are typically represented as either the model minority, the immigrant whose successful assimilation serves to discipline other minorities, or the yellow peril, the eternal foreigner threatening to invade (including from within). How are these figures not only racial but also gendered and sexual, ultimately rooted in the fear that the other may not be human-and that this other will encroach upon the self, reveal the human as other? In what ways do gender, sexuality, and animality, in turn, challenge, even undermine, race? This course zeroes in on Asian/American gender/sexuality to examine the intertwined constitution and irreducible contradictions of desire, power, and identity while keeping an eye on the animal at humanity’s limits. Interrogating the social structures-e.g., patriarchy, white supremacy, Western colonialism, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism-that underpin subjective categories, the course will more broadly think about relationality itself, with everything that it entails-e.g., (in)visibility, love, violence, beauty, abjection, friendship, family, the body, consumption, pain, joy, emotionality, optimism, fantasy, and the crossing of boundaries. We will focus on American representations of Asian masculinity and femininity, Asian association in the (post)colony with appetite, and Asian reclamations of the queer/child/animal. Readings may include M. Butterfly, Warrior, The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R. R. Co., Charlie Chan is Dead 2, The Joy Luck Club, “Happiness: A Manifesto,” The Book of Salt, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, The Surrendered, Dogeaters, Sort Of, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. 20th/21st c.
At least one W course. Recommended: at least one ENGL, ASAM, or GSST course Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST, ASIA, ASAM Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 047DSoutheast Asian Literature in English1
In traditional terms the part of the world between China and India, Southeast Asia lies at a global crossroads where the giants of the continent have historically spread their influence and where the East met the West due to the European scramble for “the (East) Indies.” Its position at these borderlands has made Southeast Asia one of the world’s most diverse, but also liminal, sites, as indicated by its elision in history and literary studies (including in postcolonial studies, if not as much in area studies). Given the minor role to which it is relegated in the world and in Asia, how does the history of Southeast Asia get narrated in its literature-in particular, in literature written in or translated into English, the postwar lingua franca? This course charts modern Southeast Asian history through literature from or about its different periods-from the colonial era to the world between the wars to independence to the contemporary time. In the process, we will examine the literary strategies invented and adopted by locals to tell their (version of) history as well as the language of transmission-a language that, as it becomes more and more universal, might efface the very thing for which we are looking. Readings will come from mainland and maritime Southeast Asia as well as the diaspora and may include Dumb Luck , The Harmony Silk Factory , A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino , Only a Girl , Insurrecto , Virtual Lotus , and A/PART . 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM, ASIA, GLBL-paired.
ENGL 047ESoutheast Asian Literature in Translation1
In traditional terms the part of the world between China and India, Southeast Asia lies at a global crossroads where its more powerful neighbors have spread their influence and where the East met the West in the European scramble for “the (East) Indies.” This position at a Pacific borderland has long led the region to function as a transnational contact zone, thus to be defined in reference to external actors-as intimated by a name for its peninsular half, “Indochina”-or in indeterminate ways-as intimated by a name for its maritime half, the “Malay Archipelago.” Given this irreducibly minor status to which Southeast Asia is relegated (not to mention the region’s multifarious colonial histories and diverse indigenous regimes), is there a Southeast Asian literature ? If so, what histories does it lend sight of, both particular to the (nations in the) region and symptomatic of the world? This course turns to Southeast Asian literature that has been translated for a global readership -to folk tales, a “medieval” chronicle, the colonial novel/serial, a World War II novel, magic realism, melodrama, and ecofiction-to chart national/regional/world history from precolonial to contemporary times. In the process, it will examine history and literature’s common narrative structure and incommensurability, thus the potentials and problems of translation. Readings will be in English and may include Nusantara , The Genealogy of Kings ( Sulalat Al-Salatin ), Noli Me Tangere , Dumb Luck ( So Do ), Potions and Paper Cranes ( Perempuan Kembang Jepun ), Beauty is a Wound ( Cantik Itu Luka ), The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth ( Saiduean Ta Bod Nai Khaowongkot ), Revenge of Gaia , and Virtual Lotus . This is the second of a two-part course sequence that also includes Engl 47D, “Southeast Asian Literature in English” (47D and 47E may be taken independently of each other and in any order, and may also be combined into an Honors preparation). 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM, ASIA, GLBL-paired, CPLT.
Ireland’s complicated historical divisions have provided fertile ground for extraordinary poetry, both in the Republic and in the North. This course will consider poetry by Heaney, Boland, Carson, McGuckian, Muldoon, and ni Dhomnaill (among others) within the sociopolitical contexts of contemporary Ireland. 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 050DLiterature and Art on the US-Mexico Border1
This course will examine the shifting expressions of the U.S.-Mexico Border in the US-American literary and cultural imagination from 1848 to the present. We will begin by considering Chicanx theorist Mary Pat Brady’s suggestion that “the border might be understood more fully as a state-sponsored aesthetic project” (Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies 52). If the border is to be understood as an aesthetic project, what are its formal elements, and how have they shifted over time? Which narratives of belonging has this national project made hyper-visible and which has it occluded? How have treaties, maps, novels, pamphlets, poems, and films figured into the production of the border as a dividing line and a contact zone, a site of violence and of solidarity, a material place and a metaphor? In order to answer these questions and to generate more along the way, we will consider a range of legal, literary, and cultural texts. These may include The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), George Washington Gomez (c. 1930s), science-fiction, migrant testimonies, contemporary films, as well as recent interventions by digital artists and activists in the border zone. Limited to 30 students. For English Literature majors and minors, this course will count towards the historical distribution requirements as either an 18th/19th century course or as a 20th/21st century course, based upon the student’s final project and the recommendation of the professor. GATEWAY English Literature; no prerequisites, suitable for any student. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for LALS, ESCH
In literature as in life, friendship can fade into the background behind the showier attachments of sex, romance, and family. This class aims to bring it into the foreground by studying the politics of friendship in nineteenth-century U.S. literature, from guides explaining how to write letters to friends to novels like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, and Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. There we find friendship as the basis for utopian experiments in communal living, as the glue and the undoing of capitalist production, as a tool of both abolitionist organizing and racist violence, and as the material of revolutionary uprisings. Together, these works ask how we are bound to one another, and what other bonds we could forge. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit.
What can the radical thinking and practice of the past teach us about the political possibilities of today? This course explores the explosion of anti-slavery, anti-racist, socialist, free love, anarchist, and anti-imperialist writing in and around the nineteenth-century US. It looks to these past radicalisms not only as forerunners of present ones, but also for models of revolutionary world-making that may appear strange, irrational, or incomprehensible from the point of view of the present. We will read primary texts across a range of genres, placing a particular emphasis on the early Black radical tradition, as well as a selection of secondary texts to help us theorize and historicize this work. Eligible for GLBL-Paired Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 051Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Early American Literature1
This course examines American literature from its earliest recorded oral traditions to the Civil War by focusing on outsiders, or what Trinidadian critic C.L.R. James, writing about Moby-Dick, called “mariners, renegades, and castaways.” Our readings will include not only Melville’s once neglected, now famous novel, but also a wide range of less familiar texts, including origin stories, captivity narratives, poetry, and manifestoes. 18th/19th c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit.
Today there is no more canonical nineteenth-century American novel than Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. But when Herman Melville published it in 1851, critics were mystified, readers were uninterested, and most of the copies of the book burnt in a fire at the publisher’s warehouse. This course will study Moby-Dick as both a mesmerizingly singular text and one deeply embedded in the world in which it first flopped-or breached, depending on your perspective. We will read Moby-Dick slowly over the course of the semester. Simultaneously, students will situate the novel in the context of mid-nineteenth-century slavery, colonialism and imperialism, and the rise of industrial capitalism, through assigned readings and independent research. We will explore Melville’s source material and consider a range of literary criticism that seeks to understand the novel’s own experiments with-and joyous repudiation of-knowledge production. The course will culminate in the organization of a 25-hour Moby-Dick readathon that will invite the whole campus into the vortex of this hilarious, moving, boring, maddening book. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2027 Cohen.
“U.S. Fiction 1900 - 1950” focuses on selected well-known and newly recognized U.S. authors important for this period: L. Frank Baum, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, Dashiell Hammett, and two writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance: Zora Neale Hurston and George Schuyler. We’ll read mostly novels, but also some short stories. There will be attention to innovations in fiction as a flexible and varied literary form, and to the ways in which these writers engage with their historical context-particularly regarding issues of immigration, race, redefinitions of gender roles, the rising influence of new commercial media, and contestations over the meaning of “American.” Selected background / historical material will also be assigned.
This course will focus on U.S. fiction published since 1980 to the present. The reading list will feature global perspectives on the U.S. as well as new understandings of the U.S.’s past and present. We’ll explore these novels’ formal inventiveness as well as their engagement with history, race, gender and sexuality, and a variety of other social issues, including multi-racial identities. Two of the readings will use the genre of “speculative fiction” to imagine the U.S.’s future. These stories question and rewrite the possibilities of personal, family, and national/transnational narratives. All also feature complex and compelling characters, both the heroes and their antagonists. Authors include Octavia Butler, Armistead Maupin, Paule Marshall, Celeste Ng, Patricia Park, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Meg Wolitzer. The reading load will be somewhat heavy-about one novel per week, along with brief supplemental materials. But I hope you’ll find these novels are fun and thought-provoking. This course is open to all students, without prerequisite. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Schmidt.
ENGL 052CContemporary US Fiction, 1990 to the Present1
This course will focus on contemporary U.S. fiction published since 1990 or so. The reading list will feature global perspectives on the U.S. as well as new understandings of the U.S.’s past and present by U.S.-born authors. We’ll explore the novels’ formal inventiveness as well as their engagement with history, race, gender, and a variety of other social issues, including multi-racial single and family identities (and, by implication, how this may help the U.S. national narrative evolve away from white suprematism). Three of the readings will use the genre of “historical fiction” to reinterpret U.S. history, but all the texts rewrite the possibilities of personal, family, and national/transnational narratives. A special feature of the course will be the celebration of Swarthmore alum Patricia Park, who will visit Swarthmore to read from and discuss her first novel. Entitled Re Jane, its heroine Jane Re is a mixed-race orphan on a quest to learn more about her family history. The novel is set in Queens, Brooklyn, and Korea, and is both a fun romantic comedy and a clever reimagining of the Jane Eyre plot. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ESCH
In this class, we will examine some of the major texts, media, and themes of U.S. literature of the twenty-first century. What can we say about the history we are ourselves living through? What fears and anxieties distinguish our moment? What perspective (or lack thereof) do we have on our own time? In order to organize these disparate and difficult questions, we will organize our readings around an industry that quietly shapes where and how we live. It also organizes the themes of belonging, segregation, migration, the weight of the past, and the uncertainty of the future that are characteristic of U.S. life in this century: real estate. Texts may include Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House , Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home , Colson Whitehead’s Zone One , and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 . GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities 1 credit.
ENGL 052MArmistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and Queer Pasts and Futures1
28 Barbary Lane: the boarding house at a mythical address in San Francisco run by Anna Madrigal, the most beloved trans character in U.S. literature. It’s where those who are queer, straight, trans, and questioning find their logical or chosen family, the home where they are seen and to which they can always return. We’ll read several of Maupin’s novels from his Tales of the Cities series (1970s - 2014), including Michael Tolliver Lives , plus we will view and debate the most recent TV adaptation of Tales (HBO 2019). Also explored will be secondary sources by queer and other theorists of sexuality and sociality, including Butler, Sedgwick, Muñoz, Lorde, Halberstam, McCauley, Braidotti, and Love. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST.
An introductory survey of the full range of 20th-century American poetry, but we will commence with Whitman and Dickinson, two key predecessors and enablers. The emphasis will be on particular poets and poems, but a recurrent theme will be poetry’s role in a democracy: is poetry really an esoteric art for the “educated” few, as some imply, or has poetry in the 20th century played a crucial role in shaping both democratic citizens and a sense of democratic culture? 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit.
A limited-enrollment, research-oriented colloquium for students who have done well in a previous U.S. literature course and would like to do advanced work. We will focus on readings and research materials to learn some basic methods and theory relevant for contemporary archival research using print and online resources. Later in the semester students will be able to propose, design, and present their own research project to the class. Students will conclude the course by writing a research thesis on a topic of their choice approved by the professor; they will also write a short paper on the earlier materials. 20th/21st c.
English 52 (A or B) or English 53, or an equivalent mid-level course covering U.S. or colonial literature taught by the Swarthmore English department. Enrollment limited to 15. Humanities. 1 credit. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 054Toni Morrison1
(Cross-listed as BLST 054 ) As the recipient of numerous literary prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, and National Book Critics Circle Award, to name a few), Toni Morrison was an author of international renown whose books routinely occupied a place on domestic and international best seller lists. Indeed, it is safe to say that her work transcended what many readers ascertain as “black writing” in the 21st Century. Her works consistently engaged the role memory, place, and community play in our lived experience. But how did Morrison understand her literary project in light of the fact that she eschewed the white gaze as a controlling motif in her fictions? In a moment when discussions about how-and sometimes, whether-we value Black bodies are happening all around us, this course offers us an opportunity to use the reading of Morrison’s novels as a catalyst for new ways to think not only about how we can occupy place, but happily cohabit with our neighbors whether they look like us, share our point of origin, or reflect our values. In the process, we will endeavor to become a learning community in which critical thinking, analysis, dialogue, and debate are central to developing inclusive methods of inquiry. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST
Many of us feel like we are living on the edge of apocalypse. In this class we will address our imminent future by looking to the apocalyptic literature of the past. We will begin with N. K. Jemison’s 2015 novel The Fifth Season and then move back in time to consider earlier visions of the end of the world, focusing on the nineteenth-century US. Some of the texts we’ll read describe apocalypses as they were unfolding, like Sarah Winnemucca’s narrative of the annihilation of indigenous lives and lifeways by settler-colonialism, Life among the Paiutes . Others visualize apocalypses that had yet to take place, like the prophecies of earthly destruction that inspired Nat Turner’s and John Brown’s revolts against slavery. Our task will be to explore how these works confront the end of the world-and what new ideas and relations they forge by living with the end in sight. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit.
Founded as a democratic republic, the United States has from its inception also been celebrated as an empire-a tendency that culminated in wars and thereafter started to be disavowed. This course reads accounts by the colonizer and by the colonized, within and outside America, to study the paradox of empire (the anti-imperialist imperialism?) at the heart of U.S. sovereignty. After examining theories of the U.S. as (the opposite of) an empire, we will read literature from or about the three phases of U.S. imperialism. First, we will look at the development of the American West-also known as indigenous lands (focusing on Aztlán and the Blackfeet)-and the hybridity it entailed. Next, we will chart the extension of U.S. Western Expansion abroad around 1898, when, continuing European modernity, the U.S. conspired to overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii, annexed Spain’s remaining colonies-notably, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines-and dominated the Western Hemisphere. Finally, we will explore U.S. world-building after World War II in the context of the Cold War and of 9/11 via the conjunction not only of politics and economics but also of militarism and multiculturalism-in particular, in South America, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. In tracing this geopolitical genealogy through historical and literary texts, we will consider how the U.S. represents itself as the antithesis of empire amid attempts by its subjects to narrate another (hi)story. Readings may include American Progress , The Revenant , Borderlands / La Frontera , Fools Crow , Martí’s journalism, “To Roosevelt,” “The White Man’s Burden,” the debate over expansionism, Billy Budd , Sailor , Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen , Boy Scouts in the Philippines , Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow , Through the Arc of the Rainforest , Human Acts , Missionaries , and Call Her Ganda . This course may be combined with another in the ENGL 057 series into an Honors Preparation course (pending instructor approval).
At least one W course. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM, CPLT, GLBL-Paired, PEAC Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 058Climate Fiction1
(Cross-listed as ENVS 058 ) Climate fiction responds to the immensity of climate change through a variety of modes including journalism, dystopia, speculation, black comedy. We will hone skills of thinking, writing, and speaking critically about cultural forms and social structures entangled with our changing climate and environment. Authors include Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jesmyn Ward, and Richard Powers. 20th/21st c. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS
When we think of 19th century American literature, we tend to think of novels: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick , Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans , and so on. But the novel was still a new and somewhat dubious genre in the nineteenth-century U.S., and its identity was not yet settled. In this course, we will read some of the “big” books of the period, but we will try to read them as they might have been read at the time, as experimental controversial works. Texts may include Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables , William Wells Brown’s Clotel , and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona , in addition to those listed above. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as BLST 060 ) This course studies the wide variety of Black media cultures in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, including newspapers, broadside poetry, sheet music, friendship albums, political pamphlets, and novels. We will attend closely to the materiality of these texts, reading not only for the work of authors but also that of illustrators, editors, typesetters, and readers. How did these cultural workers shape racial identities, aesthetic forms, and political possibilities through media technologies? Our investigations will be informed by readings in recent theory and criticism on Black Studies, media culture, and literary history. In their final projects, students will have the chance to pursue their own original research using the rich resources of Philadelphia-area libraries. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST. Fall 2027 Cohen.
Cross-listed as BLST 061 How did Black literary production emerge to resist the institution and ideology of slavery in the United States? While this course will focus largely on antebellum slave narratives- powerful acts of self-presentation that challenged the racial logic of slavery and bore witness to its brutal violence-we will also consider Black oratory, essays, poetry, and fiction of the late 18th and 19th centuries. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST.
Cross-listed as BLST 062 A survey of twentieth-century Black autobiography, emphasizing the significance of the autobiography as an act of representation, not simply a document of experience. What strategies do Black narrators like Du Bois, Wright, Hurston, Dunham, Baldwin, Lorde, and Malcolm X employ to represent themselves, and how? How do their textual strategies and contextual concerns change from the Jim Crow regime into the post-Civil Rights era? 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST. Spring 2027. Foy.
Cross-listed as BLST 063 How does the Black subject become the source and site of intersectional theory? This course examines the complexities of Black self-presentation in relation to gender, sexuality, class, place, and history, with a particular focus on developments within the last decade, the era of Black Lives Matter. 20th/21st c. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST.
Cross-listed as BLST 064A The first in a sequence of courses on the post-Emancipation development of African American literature, this course focuses on the Black literary florescence that began at the end of the 19th century even as the strictures and structures of the Jim Crow regime hardened. What, then, is the relationship between the birth of Jim Crow and the birth of a “New Negro”? 18th/19th c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST.
Cross-listed as BLST 064B The second in a sequence of courses on the development of African American literature, this course explores the historical conditions, political concerns, and aesthetic currents of Black cultural production during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s through its aftermath in the 1930s. 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST. Access the class schedule to search for sections.
Cross-listed as BLST 064C The third in a sequence of courses on the development of African American literature, this course examines both the rise of popular Black protest literature and other works that sought to counter, complicate, or complement it during the 1940s and 1950s. Through the work of such Black writers as Wright, Petry, Ellison, Baldwin, Brooks, Himes, Marshall, and Hansberry, we will consider how they addressed the dilemmas of racial representation. 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST. Fall 2026. Foy.
Cross-listed as BLST 064D The fourth in a sequence of courses on the development of African American literature, this course examines the impact of Black cultural nationalism on the poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography of the 1960s, attending to the iconography, ideology, and aesthetics of “soul.” 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST.
(Cross-listed as ASAM 065 ) How does Asian American literature function as the site of key debates about ethnic and national identity? This course explores Asian American cultural production over the past 50 years, beginning with Flower Drum Song (1961), the first Hollywood film starring an all-Asian American cast, and ending with the Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. Authors include Maxine Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, David Henry Hwang, and Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA
ENGL 066In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique1
(Cross-listed as ASAM 066 ) Popular representations of Asian Americans frame this immigrant group as either invisible (unseen and unheard) or hypervisible (as “yellow peril” or “terrorist”). By contrast, the writers, scholars, and artists that we will examine in this class challenge such linear narratives, and create new futures of Asian America. This class will highlight critical theories of race and ethnicity in relation to a wide range of textual forms: literature, performance, visual culture. Students will also collaborate, when possible, with Asian American arts organizations in the Philadelphia area. 20th/21st c.
ENGL 065, 19th/20th Century English course. INTP, GSST, FMST classes will also be considered. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA, GSST, ESCH. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 067James Baldwin’s Civil Rights1
Cross-listed as BLST 067 Focusing on that prolific period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s when James Baldwin arose as a spokesperson, celebrity, and artist of the Civil Rights Movement, this course engages his thought through his fiction, essays, drama, and memoir, paying particular attention to the ethics and aesthetics of Blackness, race, gender, sexuality, and history. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, ASAM. Spring 2027. Foy.
Cross-listed with BLST 067B Whereas ENGL 67 (“James Baldwin’s Civil Rights”) focuses closely on the legendary Black author’s major work of the 1960s, this complementary course explores Baldwin’s other work-fiction, drama, essays (both collected and uncollected), interviews, conversations, and films. This reading-intensive course will continue to examine some key themes in Baldwin’s work: Blackness, race, gender, sexuality, and history. Appropriate for students who have not yet taken ENGL 67, as well as those who have. Humanities. 1 credit.
Since the 1970s, younger generations of African American writers, artists, and intellectuals have struggled over the meaning of Blackness in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements that preceded them. Supported by a handful of historical and critical studies, we will examine how black novelists, playwrights, and poets in the ‘post-soul’ era have dealt with a complex of shifting and interconnected concerns, including the imperatives of racial representation in a society increasingly driven by mass consumption and global media, the contentious discourses of sexual politics, and the polarization of classes within Black America. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST
This course will introduce students to the U.S. literature of the Reconstruction era. We will interpret the historical period and political project of ”Reconstruction” broadly to include texts produced during and, in some cases, after the formal period of direct federal intervention in the south after the Civil War. If, as many scholars have suggested, Reconstruction was ultimately a contest over meaning-the meaning of the Civil War, of freedom, of race, of the nation, and of citizenship-then it did not end in 1877. Indeed, as the historian Eric Foner has suggested, Reconstruction is still not over. In addition to introducing students to the culture of the Reconstruction period, this course will also broadly consider the place of war, national citizenship, freedom, and race in post-bellum American literature. Authors to include Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Albion W. Tourgée, WEB Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Kate Chopin. GATEWAY English Literature. For English Literature majors and minors, this course can count as either an 18th/19th or 20th/21st century course. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 070AIntroductory Poetry Workshop: Forms & Techniques1
This workshop will provide students with the knowledge and tools to confidently craft original poetry. Through close-reading modern and contemporary texts, producing weekly poems, and engaging thoughtfully with one another’s work, students will gain understanding of traditional poetic elements and forms, as well as how, why, and when to break them. Limited to 12 students. Graded CR/NC. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Parker. Fall 2027 Okparanta.
This course is a systematic introduction to the craft of fiction writing. It will consist of in-depth analyses of selected short stories in conjunction with workshops of your own stories. Basic craft elements such as plot, character development, dialogue, imagery, voice, figurative language, and point of view will be explored. Attendance at visiting author readings is required. This course is limited to 12 Students. Enrollment by lottery Graded CR/NC.
Permission of instructor. Humanities. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Okparanta. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 070CAdvanced Poetry Workshop1
Poetry books often represent their authors’ conscious statements, made through selection, organization, and graphic presentation. In this workshop, students design and complete their own volumes. Attendance at readings required. Limited to 12 students. Graded CR/NC.
ENGL 070A, 070D, 070G, or 070J, or similar workshop elsewhere. Admission and credit determined by instructor. Humanities. 1 credit. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 070DAdvanced Poetry Workshop: The Poetic Sequence1
In this workshop, students will explore the poetic sequence as a multifaceted structure for expanding, refracting, and deepening sources of tension in draft poems. Rather than placing pressure on a single poem to flesh out the physical, emotional, and intellectual contexts at hand, we’ll investigate our draft poems as source material for generating poetic sequences. The poetic sequence offers a unique opportunity for sustained exploration of a compelling question, topic, and/or theme. In class discussions, we’ll consider the following questions: how do poets use reflection, refraction, and juxtaposition to shape a narrative arc, pose a question, or develop an argument across a series of lyric utterances? What is the role of white space, silence, and restraint within a sequence? In the presence of destabilizing aspects such as associative leaps, what features offer stabilizing forces for the reader? How might we characterize formal v. thematic unity in the class examples, and their respective effects? With a primary (but not exclusive) focus on poems by BIPOC writers, our reading list will include poets such Natasha Tretheway, Megan Fernandez, A. Van Jordan, Rick Barot, Torrin A. Greathouse, Vievee Francis, Layli Long Soldier, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Tyehimba Jess. Students will experiment with prompts inspired by class models and apply kaleidoscopic approaches to expand their draft material. Strategies will include given forms such as the sonnet corona, haibun/burning haibun, and ghazal, as well as shaping strategies such as persona, erasure, hermit crab forms, and collage. Drawing on craft elements such as point of view, tone, syntax, as well as narrative, lyrical, and rhetorical modes, students will produce a constellation of poems meant to be in conversation with each other. Attendance and written peer feedback are mandatory. Previous workshop experience required. Attendance at readings required. Limited to 12 students. C/NC
At least 1, ideally 2, previous workshops (ENGL 070A, 070E, 070G, or 070J, or similar workshop elsewhere.) Admission and credit determined by instructor. Humanities. 1 credit. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
In this creative writing workshop, we will explore fiction, nonfiction and poetry, with particular attention paid to the porous borderlands between the three forms. We will do so through readings, discussions, guest lectures and, centrally, through workshops of original student work in both genres. We will delve into standard elements of fiction and nonfiction including dialogue, plot, character development, point of view, and will also pay close attention to how prose writers use poetic devices and modes to enhance and deepen their craft. Similarly, we will explore elements of poetry including lineation, repetition, the poetic “I,” and more, and will look at how some poets use prose elements in their work. Student workshop submissions will draw from all three forms, with an eye toward writing that both acknowledges and breaks down genre borders, and that embraces porousness, strangeness and expansiveness. Graded CR/NC. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Rothman-Zecher. Fall 2027 Rothman-Zecher.
This workshop examines how contemporary poets explore present-day topics while navigating their own subjectivity, how their works are in conversation with cultural trends and currents, and how these socio-political themes intersect and overlap. Students will learn to honor their own contemporary obsessions and perspectives to create authentic and meaningful poems. Though this workshop is open to all levels, it is recommended for students who have some poetry-writing experience . Graded CR/NC. Humanities 1 credit. Spring 2028 Parker.
(Cross-listed as ENVS 045A ) This course uses the Crum woods as a laboratory setting for the production of multimedia poems and brief memoirs. Digital stories combine spoken words with images, sound, and sometimes video to create powerful short movies. We’ll spend time grappling with some of the stories inherent in the Crum woods ecosystem as well as the multifaceted story of our relationship to the woods. The class will conclude with a public screening of work produced. Graded CR/NC Humanities 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS, ESCH. Fall 2026. Bolton.
In this class we will study the art and craft of writing and publishing fiction. This course will allow students to explore various short fiction publication venues while also honing in on their own short fiction craft. Our classes will consist of in-depth analyses of students’ stories with some informal discussion of published, selected short stories. When possible, published authors will be invited to answer student questions related to craft and publication strategies in Q&A sessions. Students will be required to engage with writing prompts and to participate in workshops of their submitted manuscripts. Limited to 12 students. Graded CR/NC.
ENGL 070B or similar fiction workshop, or permission of instructor. Humanities. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Okparanta. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 070IFiction Workshop: Breaking the Egoic Trance1
We are wired - at least in some parts of our brains - to view ourselves as the center of the world; stuck in what some mindfulness teachers call “the egoic trance,” we see our pain as the most painful, our shame as the most shameful, our life and life-story as the most vivid, detailed, complicated and real. At some point, of course, or at many points, each of us recognizes the deep absurdity of such delusions, and yet, again and again, we are lulled back into the trance, both by internal mechanisms, and by a culture that hallows and sanctifies notions of hyper-individualism, capitalist accumulation, fixed national borders, private property, et cetera. How, then, can reading and writing fiction serve as path toward awakening, again and again, from the fiction of the separate Self? In this class, we will turn both to teachers of mindfulness and practitioners of fiction writing -Ruth Ozeki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jalaluddin Rumi, Toni Morrison, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Marilynne Robinson, Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, George Saunders, Tara Brach, and more- to grapple with these questions, and will incorporate practices of mindfulness into our fiction writing and reading; the course will also center around workshopping one another’s fiction, in a method and manner that uplifts both mindfulness and self- and other-compassion, and seeks, in itself, to break the egoic trance. Intermediate workshop
At least one, ideally two, previous workshops. CR/NC. Humanities. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Rothman-Zecher. Spring 2028 Rothman-Zecher. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 070JThe Poetry Project: Research and Development1
Behind the poem’s eloquence, there’s often a structure (scientific, historical, philosophical, literary) supported by focused research. This course examines poetry based on research, and students explore archival resources to write poems suggested by their own researches. Attendance at readings required. Limited to 12 students. 20th/21st c. Graded CR/NC. Open to first-year students. Humanities. 1 credit.
Students - whether Course or Honors majors or minors – who plan a directed writing project in fiction or poetry must consult with the Director of the Program in Creative Writing and if possible with a member of the Department’s writing faculty who might supervise the project, and must submit a prospectus to the Department by way of application for such work before the beginning of the semester during which the project is actually done. The number of these ventures the Department can sponsor each year is limited. Graded CR/NC. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 070MPoetry Workshop: Poems of Protest and Resistance1
Solmaz Sharif contends, “Every poem is an action. Every action is political. Every poem is political.” In this intermediate workshop, we will unpack poetic strategies across a diverse group of politically-charged poems. Through class discussion, we’ll consider the following questions: what makes a poem “political”? What craft elements support a poem’s capacity to effectively engage us in politicized material? How does an interplay between the personal and the political affect a poem’s impact? What strategies can we apply to help us tackle personal and politicized topics of our own? Together, we’ll investigate how diction, syntax, sensory description, and other craft elements work together to give shape to politicized material and to create reader engagement. With a primary (but not exclusive) focus on poems by BIPOC writers, our reading list will include poets such as Ilya Kaminsky, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Layli Long Soldier, Solmaz Sharif, Claudia Rankine, Chen Chen, Harryette Mullen, Craig Santos Perez, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, and others. During the workshop, students will experiment with weekly prompts and provide peer feedback on draft poems. Using class examples, we’ll consider how to flesh out the social, cultural, and historical contexts of our poems in ways that bring greater depth and meaning to our work. Previous workshop experience strongly preferred. Admission and credit determined by instructor. Limited to 12 students. CR/NC Humanities 1 credit.
Sometimes a short story can be drafted in a great surge of inspiration, but a novel is a different kind of literary beast. How do we prepare ourselves to keep a story going over a hundred pages? What forms can a novel’s outlining take? What organizational tools can we use when planning a novel? What models can we draw inspiration from? This generative workshop will provide students with two organizational options of approaching their novels or novellas. Published models of each option will be read, discussed, and explored at the onset of the semester, followed by the generative in-class portion of the class, followed by the student workshop section of the semester. Reading and commenting on each other’s work will form the core of our work during the workshop section of the semester. By the end of the semester, you should have some polished excerpts from the beginning, middle, and ending of your novel or novella, if not the whole. Attendance at readings is required. Limited to 12 students. Graded CR/NC. Humanities 1 credit.
ENGL 070QIntermediate Fiction Workshop: Writing Fantasy and Other Worlds
This class will introduce students to the art and craft of writing fantastical worlds. We will engage in close readings of selected fantasy/Sci-Fi published texts by well-known writers such as Octavia Butler, Adam Johnson, N.K. Jemisin, James Tiptree, Jr., and many more. Students will be required to participate in class discussions and creative writing assignments, to be completed both in and outside of our class sessions. Students will also be required to workshop two full-length pieces of their own. Basic craft elements such as plot, setting, character development, dialogue, scenes, imagery, voice, figurative language, point of view, clarity of thought, and sociocultural significance of theme(s) will be discussed during workshops. But more importantly, the course will focus on intricate world building techniques (The Magic and Its Rules, The Goal/Quest and the Obstacle in Its Way, The Unique Inhabitants, Naming Names, Movement of Time & Age, and Defining the Landscape). Attendance at readings required. Limited to 12 students. Graded CR/NC. Humanities. Fall 2026. Okparanta. Spring 2028 Okparanta.
ENGL 070RBetween Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction1
What makes a story true? What are the borders between memoir / creative nonfiction and fiction that draws from an author’s lived experiences, and how porous are these borders? When a memoirist includes dialogue from when they were eight years old, are we to assume that they are directly quoting an audio recording? When a novelist named, say, Moriel, centers a story around a novelist named Zoriel, are we to allow that every detail about this character is utterly imaginary? Put otherwise, why is it that when we read memoirs, we often ask, “Did this really happen?” and when we read fiction, we often ask, “How much of this is based on real life?” What impact does this border, between memoir and perhaps-autobiographical fiction, have on the real world? When is it useful, and when is it limiting? How can reading and writing fiction inform our creative nonfiction, and vice versa? How can fictionalizing a story increase its truthfulness? And how can faithfully retelling a true story be an act of deepest art [/artifice]? In this workshop, we will explore these questions and more, through close reading and in-class discussion, and through workshopping original student writing, both in the form of creative nonfiction / memoir, and fiction. CR/NC Humanities. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as FMST 015 ) This course introduces students to the fundamentals of screenwriting while enabling them to explore their unique sensibility as writers. We consider how screenplays differ from other dramatic forms and understand what makes good cinematic storytelling. By looking at short and feature-length scripts and films, we examine issues of structure, character development, effective use of dramatic tension and dialogue, tone, and theme. Through in-class exercises and discussions, students flesh out their ideas and grapple with their writing in a supportive workshop atmosphere. Coursework includes screenings, short assignments, and the completion of several drafts of a short screenplay. No previous writing experience required.
Instructor’s approval. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for FMST. Fall 2026. Staff. Spring 2027. Staff. Fall 2027 Evans. Spring 2028 Evans. Catalog chapter: Film and Media Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/film-media-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 070TTranslation Workshop
(Cross-listed as RUSS 070 , LING 070 , LITR 070R ) This workshop in literary translation will concentrate on both theory and practice, working in poetry, prose, and drama as well as editing. Students will participate in an associated series of bilingual readings and will produce a substantial portfolio of work. Students taking the course for linguistics credit will write a final paper supported by a smaller portfolio of translations. No prerequisites exist, but excellent knowledge of a language other than English (equivalent to a 004 course at Swarthmore or higher) is highly recommended or, failing that, access to at least one very patient speaker of a foreign language. Humanities 1 Fall 2026. Forrester.
ENGL 070UIntroductory Fiction Workshop: Life As Inspiration1
This class will focus on making fiction out of life experiences. We will engage in close readings of selected published texts by contemporary writers, looking at their biographies and the possible real life influences and inspirations for their fiction. Students will be required to participate in class discussions and creative writing assignments, to be completed both in and outside of our class sessions. Students will also be required to workshop at least two full-length pieces of their own. Basic craft elements such as plot, narrative arc, setting, character development, dialogue, scenes, imagery, voice, figurative language, point of view, clarity of thought, and sociocultural significance of theme(s) will be discussed during workshops. Attendance at readings required. Limited to 12 students. Graded CR/NC. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Okparanta. Spring 2028 Okparanta.
Short story writing is arguably the most challenging of all fiction writing. This class focuses on the craft of writing short stories and breaks down the story into elements such as: character, dialogue, plot, point of view, and structure. Students will be required to read and discuss fiction by major writers, to critique each other’s work, and to write and revise at least one short story. Graded CR/NC. Limited to 12. Humanities. 1 credit.
In this workshop’s definition, a work of flash fiction is a complete work of fiction shorter than 1,000 words. The writer Yasunari Kawabata described his flash fiction works as “palm-of-the-hand” stories. Narrative Magazine, inspired by Ernest Hemmingway’s famous six-word story (“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”) specifically seeks six-word-story flash fiction submissions (Margaret Atwood: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”). In this new intro fiction workshop, we will collectively explore the possibilities of this form, and see what happens to our fiction writing when we require ourselves to write short short works. We will read works of flash fiction by dozens of 20th and 21st century authors, spanning genres and subject-matter and styles, and we will also write and workshop many original works of flash fiction of our own. Using generative in-class writing prompts, reading inspirations, and formal constraints, the focus on short short form will allow us to experiment widely in terms of both genre (historical fiction, literary fiction, experimental fiction, speculative fiction, etc.) and general fiction-writing mechanics (writing dialogue, POV and point of telling, voice, character development, etc.). This workshop is a great fit for students who want to try writing fiction, but have been hesitant to dip their toes in, as well as for students who are already working on long-form fiction pieces, and are curious to see what will happen to their work if they commit to writing short short fiction. Graded CR/NC Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Rothman-Zecher.
This course, titled “Nonfiction Workshop,” is something of a hybrid course. We will be examining and deconstructing first-rate works of nonfiction in a number of genres, including excerpts from memoir, first-person essays, features, magazine writing, short sketches, and advocacy pieces. Students will then use those works as templates and write their own pieces, adopting the techniques observed in the works we have read and studied. Those student-written pieces will then be workshopped by their fellow-students and the professor. The common thread throughout the course is that all writings will be strictly fact-based. The emphasis will be on the principle elements of nonfiction writing – including (but not limited to) voice, structure, scene, detail, fidelity to the facts, clarity, and depth. Class size is limited to twelve. Open to students of all majors who are seriously interested in working on their writing. CR/NC Humanities Catalog chapter: English Literature
This multi-genre course will spend one intensive week focusing on each of the following genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Class will consist of readings and discussions of works by contemporary, renowned published writers, and “in-class” writing exercises based on writing prompts. The course will also include workshopping of individual student work in each genre. By the end of the semester, you will have a writer’s portfolio as well as a basic grasp of the elements of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Attendance at readings required. Limited to 12 students. Graded CR/NC. Humanities. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as SPAN 071 , LITR 071S ) This team-taught course will offer a wide-ranging overview of the short story in the Americas from a comparative perspective, emphasizing continuities and also identifying areas of innovation and transformation. The course will begin in the early 19th century with masters whose daring work in this “minor” form gave the short story new prominence in literary history: Poe, Hawthorne, and Chesnutt. Later, the class will focus on Quiroga and Borges whose innovations redefined the genre, and moved Latin American fiction into the forefront of world literature. By focusing on close reading and class discussions, we will seek to discover the distinctive characteristics of the short story, and outline its development and transformation across the continents. Does the short-story bind together the diverse literatures of the United States and Latin America? How should we identify and understand parallels between the works in English and those in Spanish? How should we explain contrasts? Of particular interest will be dialogues and influences crossing languages and literary traditions: Poe and Horacio Quiroga; Hemingway and Borges; Borges/Cortázar inspiring Barth; Rulfo’s and García Márquez’s (and others’) influences on US-based Latinx writers. Readings, assignments, and class discussions will be in English. No prior knowledge of Spanish or Portuguese is necessary. This class is open to all students, without prerequisites. For English Literature majors and minors, this course can count either as an 18th/19th or 20th/21st century course. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for LALS
English 071B is a survey of the lyric poetry in English from the Middle Ages up to the present, along with a few works read in translation. Students will learn the basics in understanding and enjoying the music of poetry, including scansion and prosody (beats and sounds). They will also learn to appreciate the basic forms of lyric poetry, including ballads and sonnets and many other forms, as well as “free” verse; they will also receive instruction on how to appreciate metaphors, irony, and the many other figures of speech and rhetorical techniques poems employ. They will also gain appreciation of poetic history and the many ways in which poets and their work have historically interacted with their eras, while also creating work that can powerfully speak to us in our present moment. We’ll use The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (Ed. Mark Strand and Eavon Boland) and Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn , a collection of essays on some of the most famous poems in English. Other course materials will be posted as needed on the English 71B Moodle site. This course is focused on great poems from the past (from the medieval era to the twentieth century), but both Making of a Poem and Paglia treat us to some very contemporary poems and poets as well. For majors and minors, this course can count either as a Med/Ren, 18th/19th, or 20th/21st century course, depending on the topics of the majority of the student’s written work. Discuss your options with the professor. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Schmidt.
Reading assignments will primarily be short stories, but will also include selected other relevant materials. The course will begin in the early 19 th century with masters whose daring and innovative work gave the short story new prominence in literary history: Poe, Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville. The syllabus will include significant late 19 th - and early 20 th -century authors who built on this legacy (such as James, Chopin, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hurston, and Faulkner, among others). After vacation break we’ll turn to later authors such as Eudora Welty, Ray Bradbury, Toni Cade Bambara, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Sandra Cisneros, Jennifer Egan, Edwidge Danticat, and many others. Our syllabus will also feature published work by recent Swarthmore graduates who have gone on to become published fiction writers. This is a Gateway English Literature course, suitable for anyone’s first or second English literature course. Majors and minors are also welcome. For majors and minors, this course can count either as an 18th/19th or as a 20th/21st century course, depending on the topic of the final research paper. GATEWAY English Literature. Spring 2028 Schmidt. Access the class schedule to search for sections.
Cross-listed as ENVS 041 This course will survey nature poems as well as poems on other relevant topics written in English from the Romantics in the early 19th century up to the present, with particular emphasis on poems from the the post-WWII era-that time when scientists began publishing evidence that human beings’ use of fossil fuels was altering the Earth’s climate in ways that might bring about the sixth Great Extinction in our planet’s history. Also emphasized: the primary role that women and/or writers of color have played in shaping ecopoetry, and in linking the climate crisis to historical trauma, social inequality, and why reparative justice is needed. The course will be taught in ways to make it welcoming to students who have not taken a literature course at Swarthmore, much less a course on poetry . Advanced students in cultural studies or poetry are also welcome. This course is cross-listed, which means that students should register for credit as either ENVS 041 or English 071E. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS. Spring 2027. Schmidt. Spring 2028 Schmidt.
In this course, we will explore contemporary autobiography and life writing. The term “writing” will be used flexibly to encompass comics, photography, and video. We will consider the use of myth and archives; how life writing represents lives beyond the writer’s own; celebrity and self-narration; and the genre of autotheory, or life writing that has become a form of theorizing (about gender, sexuality, race, and biopolitics, among other topics) in its own right. Assignments will include a creative project as well as academic essays with close textual analysis and scholarly argument. Humanities 1 credit
If someone came up and started talking a poem at you how would you know it was a poem?” Poet David Antin’s question-that one could “talk” a poem rather than “read” it-queers poetry in a way that questions any poem’s locatability. In this course, we’ll ask what it means to call something a poem. How does poetry differ from prose? How and why might those differences matter? And, as readers, what are the first steps we should take when we encounter a poem? In this course, we will take poetic form as our point of departure. Rather than a historical survey of poetry, this course will focus on specific reading strategies and how particular forms such as the sonnet, the pantoum, and blank verse have evolved over time. For example, we might read a Shakespeare sonnet alongside Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèms (1961)-a series of ten sonnets with interchangeable lines that, when rearranged, can produce more sonnets than a person could read in a lifetime. Such pairings will allow us to think about the impact that form has on our reading strategies. The last several weeks of the course will focus on poets who, like David Antin, reimagine or “unmake” poetic form. Whenever possible, we will link our course discussions to current events and contemporary publications GATEWAY English Literature Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2027 Price.
ENGL 071SContemporary Life Writing: Form and Theory1
In this course, we will explore contemporary forms of life writing. The term “writing” will be used flexibly to encompass self-representation in visual forms (including graphic memoir, photography, and video). Our topics will include the intersections among autobiography, biography, and fiction; self-narration as a public and political form; and how life writing has become intertwined with theoretical explorations of gender, sexuality, race, and biopolitics. Authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jamaica Kincaid, Maggie Nelson, and Paul B. Preciado. Assignments will include a creative life-writing project as well as academic essays with close textual analysis and scholarly argument. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for INTP
In this course, we will survey global fiction from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, tracing an arc of modernist literary practices that extends beyond the largely American and European coterie of high modernists. We will put pressure on the geopolitics of literary modernism(s), exploring how historical currents and theoretical frameworks breed new critical lenses for modernist form. And we will ask: what does it mean to be modernist? 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-core Fall 2026. Patnaik.
Encompassing the regions of the world-Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania-outside of “the West,” the Global South is more than just a geographical designation. Associated with “underdevelopment,” it is the term that has come to take the place of the “Third World” to shift emphasis from cultural difference to geopolitical relations. This course surveys literature from the bottom half of the world to chart these relations as narrated and resisted by the world system’s downtrodden. First, we will examine the Western colonization of the world, thereby the ways that the globe can be thought of as a world due to the South. Secondly, we will follow the circuits of capital that outlasted the colonial world through the migrations of labor that are capital’s precondition. These political and economic structurations are reinforced in culture-most notably, through race-which works as a trace of historical structures. This persistence of oppressive history, including within the West, is what we will turn to finally by tracing the long history of slavery, indigenous dispossession after/amid genocide, and racial conflict in the diaspora. In the process, we will explore literature as a cultural form that reworks the processes of which it is a trace, not least by giving rise to a world literature from the South. Readings may include accounts of the Conquest of the Americas, Noli me Tangere , Death and the King’s Horseman , Waiting for the Barbarians , One Hundred Years of Solitude , Omeros , Coolie Woman , Homegoing , Baby No-Eyes , and “Zaabalawi.” 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM, GLBL-core, PEAC, CPLT.
There is a longstanding debate on whether the United States is or is not an empire. Born out of anticolonial revolution, the U.S. has also from its inception been ritually celebrated as an empire-something that started to be customarily denied after the Philippine-American War. This course centers the stories of the colonized outside/within the U.S. to interrogate the U.S. (as an) empire. After examining pronouncements of U.S. “manifest destiny” and theorizations of the U.S. as (the opposite of) an empire, we will read literature from or about the three main phases of U.S. imperialism. First, we will look at the settling of the American West and the dispossession it entailed, the continuation of the genocide that was the precondition of the Thirteen Colonies. We will then chart the extension of U.S. Western Expansion abroad in and around 1898, in which the U.S. annexed Hawaii and Spain’s remaining colonies-Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines-while dominating the Western Hemisphere. Finally, we will explore U.S. world-building after World War II in which “liberation” once again, as the Vietnam War and 9/11 eras show, works as a mode of empire. In tracing this history through literature, we will consider the ways that the U.S. tells a story about itself as the antithesis of empire amid minor attempts to tell another story. Readings may include American Progress , The Revenant , “The Homeland, Aztlán,” Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , Fools Crow , Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen , “Our America,” “To Roosevelt,” “The White Man’s Burden,” “To The Person Sitting in Darkness,” Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow , Insurrecto , The Cosmic Race , The Sympathizer , and United States of Banana . 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-paired, PEAC, CPLT
This core course introduces students to critical approaches in contemporary global literatures. We will explore how literature represents the relationship between “the West and the Rest,” and examine our own relation to colonial and postcolonial histories. Novels include White Teeth, The God of Small Things, and Heart of Redness. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-core
Cross-listed as ASAM 066 This class surveys a century of migration from the Indian subcontinent to the United States. Two questions will guide our readings and discussion: First, what does it mean to identify as South Asian? Second, how do new ethnic identities expand our understanding of what it means to be American? In this interdisciplinary class, we’ll read Pulitzer Prize winning authors Jhumpa Lahiri and Ayad Akhtar; discuss what it means to identify as “brown” or “Muslim” after 9/11; and explore the lives of South Asian teenagers in Silicon Valley; political activists in New York City; and workers and artists nationwide. Throughout our readings, we will explore how ethnicity is shaped by differences of gender, religion, sexuality and class. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA, GSST
This course introduces students to high modernism, a period of literary experimentation that spanned the first half of the twentieth century. We will be interested in innovative forms, failed experiments, inner lives, social movements, and the looming shadow of history. Expect to encounter authors such as Conrad, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Faulkner. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2027 Patniak.
This course will focus on narrative developments in the modernist era. Literary modernism is often characterized as a shift from 19th-century realism toward interiority, abstraction, and fragmentation. The era’s aesthetic experimentation was shaped in part by the world wars and the influence of new technologies (e.g. radio, film, the airplane). We will consider how modernist narratives form ideas about character, the experience of time, community, race, gender and sexuality, labor, empire, and nation. We will read primarily novels and shorter fiction written in English, but will also take into account Freud’s case studies, narrative film, and philosophical writing. Authors may include James Joyce, Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, Jean Toomer, and Virginia Woolf, among others. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit.
GSST A defining figure of twentieth-century modernism, Virginia Woolf was a relentless and dazzling innovator in literary form, an incisive literary and cultural critic, and an unsparingly intimate memoirist. This course situates Woolf’s investigations of memory, intimacy, illness, loss, shame, and desire alongside the early-twentieth-century advent of psychoanalysis and contemporary queer theory. We will attend to the interplay of race, gender, and sexuality in Woolf’s works, from her interest in the modernist cosmopolis as a site of avant-garde aesthetics and queer play to her critiques of empire and global capital. We will examine Woolf’s turn to nonfiction in the late 1930s as an attempt to diagnose the patriarchal violence endemic in institutions of governance, finance, and higher education-and, ultimately, in the rise of fascism. Short secondary readings and investigative/reflective assignments will ask students to explore Woolf’s formative influence for generations of readers and writers-from fiction writers and memoirists to the newly-burgeoning fields of bibliotherapy and self-care-as well as contemporary queer engagements with modernist fiction. Humanities 1 credit Eligible for GSST Catalog chapter: English Literature
ENGL 078PMake it New: Modernism and International Experimentation1
Ezra Pound’s appeal to his contemporaries to “make it new” became the most famous dictum of literary modernism. While the phrase emphasized newness, it was, in fact, appropriated from a Chinese source. How might our understanding of literary modernism change when viewed in an international context? And how might an increasingly global world have contributed to the types of literary experimentation taking place across the globe in the first half of the 20th century? This course examines the explosion of literary and aesthetic experimentation that took place during the modernist period (ca. 1890-1945), with a particular focus on the ways in which formal invention was facilitated by global exploration. While we will primarily read American and British authors, this course will engage with how their writings explored, challenged, or were directly influenced by global texts, contexts, and encounters. Students will explore such topics as Zurich and Berlin Dadaism, French Cubism and Surrealism, Italian and Russian Futurism; and read such authors as T.S. Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and Louis Zukofsky. This course is open to first year students. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit.
What in the world is cultural studies? Focusing on film, art, fashion and music, we’ll explore how to read and write about culture and power. Literary close reading will go hand in hand with ethnography, historiography, cinema studies, and aesthetic theory. Highlighting how race, class, sexuality and gender intersect in the production and consumption of cultural texts, the class emphasizes how what we read is part of the world in which we live. 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM, INTP, GSST.
ENGL 079PCreating Sanctuary: Literature off the Shelf1
While the term “sanctuary” literally references a sanctum within a church, the term has come to more broadly describe different types of safety from harm and discrimination. This could include a country offering rights to displaced individuals, a wildlife preserve safeguarding endangered species, a city or campus protecting undocumented individuals, or a community space fostering safety and inclusion. This course delves into diverse political, institutional, and cultural interpretations of sanctuary, with a particular focus on local communities and Swarthmore College. Central to this exploration is an engagement with non-traditional literature created by communities outside of mainstream publishing. Students will read and analyze works that emerge from grassroots movements and community voices, providing an alternative perspective to the conventional literary canon. This course includes the co-creation of a publication with community partners. In Fall 2026, students will collaborate with a local community, likely in the city of Chester, though details are being finalized. This project will further illuminate the theme of sanctuary through the lens of human connection and creativity, emphasizing the vital role of literature in envisioning and actualizing spaces of refuge. 20th/21st c. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ESCH. PEAC. GLBL-paired. Fall 2026. Price.
Initially referring to the Frankfurt School project of pursuing liberation in the context of the power structures that condition thought (including the thought of liberation), Critical Theory has subsequently come to mean criticism itself, which draws on, diverges from, and even rejects “theory.” Integrating political economy, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, critical theory nonetheless rejects the all-explanatory systems of these disciplines while going beyond criticism in inquiring into not only the meaning of the text but also more fundamental questions like the text’s place in the world, meaning in the world (as a text?), and the world in and through the text. This course provides an introduction to critical theory through a survey of its schools, examining its classical precursors, German origins, and seminal later developments-notably, structuralism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, historicism, postcolonialism, feminism, and posthumanism. We will focus on theories of aesthetics, political economy, the psyche, language, history, empire, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and ecology, in the process exploring the different ways that literature can be read. Authors may include Aristotle, Nietzsche, White, Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, Althusser, Balibar, Arendt, Freud, Khanna, Saussure, Heidegger, Derrida, Hegel, Jameson, Greenblatt, Said, Bhabha, Anderson, Spivak, Morrison, Roediger, Day, Perez-Torres, Byrd, Irigaray, Spillers, Mohanty, Butler, Muñoz, Spade, Haraway, Nixon, and Bennett.
At least one ENGL course. Ideal for juniors and seniors. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for INTP Fall 2026. Song. Fall 2027 Staff. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 081Transgender Life Writing1
This course engages the work of writers who identify as transgender, asking about the relationship between intersectional transgender experience and life narrative. How has the closet typically structured narrative and subjectivity? How does transgender writing redefine ideas of character and continuity? How do narrative and intersectional gender theory form and inform one another? How do various writers configure transgendered bodies? Humanities. 1 credit.
This class introduces perspectives from domestic United States and global contexts in order to ask: How do the contributions of women of color in the United States and of feminist movements in the “Third World” radically reshape the form and content of feminist and queer politics? Through critical inquiry into major texts in transnational feminist and queer studies, the course dynamically reconceptualizes the relationship between women and nation; between gender, sexuality and globalization; and between feminist/queer theory and practice. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST
A dark lexicon emerged out of the 20th century: total war, genocide, and collateral damage were new terms invented to describe “new” versions of atrocity. But does our ability to name violence mean that we understand it any better? This course explores the aesthetic and narrative structures of violence in modern fiction, film, critical theory, and law. Even as we recognize texts as pertaining to distinct modes (modernism, postmodernism, contemporary literature) we will explore how histories of colonialism and racism condition formal innovation. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 084Human Rights and Literature: Borderzones of the Human1
This course examines how twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives imagine “the human.” Shortly after the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Hannah Arendt argued that the “right to have rights” is not, in fact, universal: in practice, rights are secured by the state. But if human rights operate within the framework of the nation-state, the problems of the contemporary moment do not. How, then, do we begin to imagine the rights-bearing human in an age of mass migrations, privatized militaries, global flows of capital, climate crises, and the world wide web? The first section of this class will be devoted to studying the ways human rights advocacy and practice has traditionally depended upon narrative structures (testimony, witnessing, reportage) and the sympathetic imagination in order to raise awareness of atrocity. The second half of the class will explore how such attempts to narrate the human face new obstacles in the twenty-first century. Course readings will include a wide array of narrative forms, from novels, memoirs, photography and film to ad campaigns, NGO reports, and Freedom Information Act requests. Primary texts will be supplemented by secondary readings (Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Joseph Slaughter, Deborati Sanyal, and Eyal Wiezman) and by research labs that will introduce students to local and regional human rights work. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for PEAC, ESCH, GLBL-Paired Spring 2028 Patniak.
In this course, we will analyze how reparations become embraced by human rights over the course of the twentieth century as a mechanism for redressing human wrongs. We will situate reparations as they emerge in national and international contexts, including redress for Japanese-American internment during World War II, the truth commissions in Central America and post-apartheid South Africa, civilian killings during the War on Terror, and reparations for slavery within America. Expect to engage with literature, philosophy, literary and legal theory, national and international treaties, and archival sources. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for PEAC
A prolific novelist, essayist, literary critic, publisher, diarist, and letter writer, Virginia Woolf at once defined and challenged the literary currents of her era. This course will explore the arc of Virginia Woolf’s career from the 1910s to the 1940s, a period coincident with the emergence of British modernism. We will read widely across Woolf’s works, situating them within the seismic cultural and political shifts of the early twentieth century and grappling with their reception in the latter half of the century and beyond. Readings of Woolf have shaped key interventions in narrative theory, modernist studies, feminist and queer theory, among others, and so we will ask: what formal, social, and political commitments shape Woolf’s work? And how do those commitments morph, evolve, or persist into our own time? Expect to read broadly and deeply, discuss thoughtfully, and develop tools to pursue your own archival and critical projects over the course of the semester. Humanities. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as HIST 090J , INTP 091 ) This course explores important works of theory, history, and fiction that were produced during (and in response to) moments of profound social, economic, and political crisis. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for INTP
(Cross-listed as FMST 021 ) This course surveys U.S. narrative film history with an emphasis on the Hollywood studio era. We consider how genres such as the western, the melodrama, and film noir express aspirations and anxieties about race, gender, class and ethnicity in the United States. Film is understood as narrative form, audiovisual medium, industrial product, and social practice. Classical Hollywood is approached as a national cinema, illuminated by attention to independent narrative traditions (“race movies,” New Queer Cinema). 20th/21st c. Humanities Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for FMST
(Cross-listed as ENVS 043 ) This course explores how ideologies and structures of race, gender, sexuality, and class are embedded in and help shape our perceptions of and actions in the “environment.” Drawing on key social and cultural theories of environmental studies from anthropology, sociology, feminist analysis, and science and technology studies, we will examine some of the ways that differences in culture, power, and knowledge construct the conceptual frameworks and social policies undertaken in relation to the environment. The course draws on contemporary scholarship and social movement activism (including memoir and autobiography) from diverse national and international contexts. Topics addressed include, for example, ideas/theories of “nature,” toxic exposure and public health, environmental perception and social difference, poverty and natural resource depletion, justice and sustainability, Indigenous environmentalisms, eco-imperialism, and disparate impacts of global climate change. The course offer students opportunities for community-based learning working in partnership with local organizations. GATEWAY English Literature. Humanities. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, ENVS, ESCH, GSST, GLBL-core
ENGL 089BEnvironmentally Engaged Literature: Pollutants, Fossil Fuels, and Atomic Bombs1
(Cross-listed as ENVS 044 ) Pollutants. Fossil Fuels. Atomic Bombs. In many ways, pesticides, oil, and plutonium structure our lives; they impact our health, our politics, and may even threaten the existence of life itself. Ironically, because these materials permeate nearly every aspect of our existence, the human mind can struggle to comprehend them. In this course, we will read literature that engages with our environment to help us bring humans’ relationship to these materials into focus. Scientific, historical, and economic studies of these materials tend to focus on their scale and widespread impact. Reading poetry, plays, short stories, and novels will allow us to imagine these materials more intimately-through individual, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives. In this course, students will ask: How can literature help us to understand-and perhaps change-our material, economic, and social environments? How has our relationship to materials changed over time? How do environmental and material realities impact cultural production and imagination? Texts under discussion will likely include: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962); Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge (1991); Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary (2009); Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons (2015); Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling (2012); Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers
(Cross-listed as ENVS 042 ) An introduction to the central themes and histories of ecofeminist theories and praxis. We will study ecological feminisms/feminist environmentalisms from global perspectives, and examine how these transdisciplinary discourses and movements develop social and cultural critiques of systems of domination, and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable human-earth relationships. Topics include ecofeminist approaches to: human rights, environmental and climate justice, food and agriculture, animal politics, health and bodies, queer ecologies, economies of “care,” militarism and imperialism, and sustainable development. Readings and course materials draw on the works of Vandana Shiva, Donna Haraway, Laura Pulido, Octavia Butler, Joni Seager, Rachel Carson, Winona LaDuke, Julie Sze, Rosi Braidotti, Jael Silliman, Starhawk, Eli Clare, Audre Lorde, Silvia Federici, Wendy Harcourt, Betsy Hartmann, Wangari Maathai. GATEWAY English Literature. First year students need instructor’s approval. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS, INTP, GSST, ESCH, GLBL-core Fall 2026. Di Chiro.
(Cross-listed as FMST 046 and GSST 020 ) The history of avant-garde and experimental media has been intertwined with that of gender non-conformity and sexual dissidence, and even the most mainstream media forms have been queered by subcultural reception. Challenging Hollywood’s heterosexual presumption and mass media appropriations of lgbt culture, we will examine lgbt aesthetic strategies and modes of address in contexts such as the American and European avant-gardes, AIDS activism, and transnational and diasporan film through the lens of queer theory. Under special circumstances particularly well-prepared freshmen can request instructor permission to take course. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST, INTP, DGHU Spring 2027. Li.
ENGL 090AMinor Characters and Ordinary People: New Methods in History and Literature1
(Cross-listed as HIST 090N ) Novels, social media, close friends, and parents help us feel like main characters in our own lives, but most of us will remain minor, relatively unimportant characters in any larger context. This course will explore the problem of the minor character and the ordinary person from the conflicting and complementary perspectives of the historians and the literary critic, using both traditional and computational methods. Are there formal analytic strategies for interpreting and examining minor characters and ordinary individuals that do not insist on moving them from the margins to the center? Or are all minor characters simply understudy protagonists and consequential people waiting for their time in the spotlight? We will trace this problem through major works of history and literature and through their transformation and interpretation using qualitative and quantitative methods. Students will create an original essay, art project or other work on a minor character or about the idea of minor character as part of the course’s final publication project. For majors and minors, this course can count either as an 18th/19th or 20th/21st century course. Humanities. 1 credit.
Cross-listed as FMST 045 This course explores theories and methods at the intersection of film and media and gender and sexuality studies, including representation and self-representation, historiography and canon formation, intersectionality and transnational politics, gender performativity and sexual dissidence, cultural production and critique. Required weekly screenings feature films and programs from a range of historical periods, national production contexts, and styles: mainstream and independent, narrative, documentary, video art, and experimental. Readings in feminist film theory will address questions of authorship and aesthetics, spectatorship and reception, image and gaze, and current media politics. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST, INTP Fall 2027 White.
How has Marxist thought informed the study of literature and culture, and how does Marxism speak to us today? This class provides a grounding in the work of Marx and Engels and then investigates how a range of more recent writers have built upon their ideas, particularly in relation to questions about race, gender, sexuality, and late capitalism. We will try out these interpretive approaches on a selection of primary texts, including poetry, pop music, advertisements, radical newspapers, fiction, and film–some assigned and some generated by the class. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for INTP, GLBL-Core
Do we control technology, or is technology controlling us? In this course we will use the dystopian visions presented through literature, film, television, and video games to investigate our culture of surveillance. The fictional depictions of virtual worlds and the virtual bodies that inhabit them will inspire our own creative projects using cutting-edge immersive reality technology. Guest speakers including media theorists and industry professionals will join us to share insights on race and identity online, and the deployment of biometrics and data collection in Virtual and Augmented Reality. We will also visit makerspaces across campus to learn about the digital fabrication tools available and engage in design sprints to create user-centered prototypes. Students will work both independently and collaboratively to research trends in immersive reality and gain experience writing storyboards, interactive fiction, grant proposals, work plans, and project critiques. No previous experience with digital fabrication or immersive reality is necessary. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for FMST Spring 2027. Licastro.
ENGL 093PLiterary Philly - A Collective Exploration1
Philadelphia is a vibrant literary city - and one without a single, monolithic literary center of gravity. In this class, taught by novelist, poet, and Swarthmore Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, students will have a chance to get to know, and contribute to, Philadelphia’s vibrant literary culture. Over the course of the semester, we will hear from and meet acclaimed Philadelphia-based novelists and poets; visit bookstores, libraries and community spaces; attend literary readings, salons, and open mics; meet with publishers and book reviewers, and more. Throughout the semester, students will be keep and turn in a weekly literary journal, in which they will write a short reflection on each week’s session, and, for their final project, students will work in groups to form some sort of a creative guide, synthesis or contribution to Literary Philadelphia - this could be a mapping of all of the city’s bookstores, a zine interviewing local poets, a review of a number of Philadelphia’s reading series, or any other method the group might come up with to reflect on Philadelphia’s literary culture, and to share with their Tri-Co peers, and beyond, ways to connect with Literary Philly. This class will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program . Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 094Aydelotte Seminar on Liberal Arts Education1
(Cross-listed as HIST 090L ) The research-intensive, partly project-based Aydelotte Seminar surveys the past and present of liberal arts education, and speculates wildly on its possible futures. Drawing on research, writing, and in-person expertise from inside and outside the academy and from across a wide range of disciplines and methods, the seminar examines how access and financial aid, curricular decisions, diversity, inequality, governance, and knowledge production play out in the context of the liberal arts institution. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ESCH
This course examines the connections between literary realism and key historical questions in the Global South, such as colonial dispossession, decolonization, and postcolonial capitalism. By studying realist novels from across the world, including Africa, the Arab world, Israel-Palestine, and South Asia, we will trace the development of a vibrant global realism that speaks both to the historic realities of colonialism and to contemporary issues of class inequality, failed emancipation, migration, and war. Our aim will be to interrogate literary aesthetics and cultural politics in the context of dynamic global transformation. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-Core
This course focuses on the evolution of Marx’s-and Marxists’-writings on global questions of empire, colonialism, and non-European societies. We will engage Marx’s key materialist reading of history and his foundational categories of analysis (such as exploitation and class struggle), tracing how Marx uses them to understand emerging international developments. We will also examine how Marxists and socialists-Lenin, Mao, and Fanon, for example-build on Marx’s insights and methodology to intervene in key questions of their own times, especially on decolonization and revolutionary politics. Our aim will be to revisit Marxism as a theory of human emancipation rooted in indigenous traditions. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-Core
This seminar will study James Joyce’s famously formidable Ulysses . Published in 1922, the experimental novel follows its characters throughout metropolitan Dublin for less than 24 hours in June 1904. Our focus will be closely reading the novel’s eighteen “episodes” as we attend to its historical and political moment, its modernist aesthetics, and the interpretive communities that formed in its wake. Topics of interest include: colonial/postcolonial Ireland, mass culture and advertising, embodiment and everyday life, the influence of early and avant-garde film and later film adaptations, the novel form and character development, and the “Joyce industry.” Humanities. 1 credit.
ENGL 097Independent Study and Directed Reading0.5-1
Students who plan an independent study or a directed reading must consult with the appropriate instructor and submit a prospectus before the semester in question. Normally limited to juniors and seniors and available only if a professor is free to supervise the project. 0.5 - 1 credit.
Course majors may pursue a thesis for 1 (40-50 pages) or 2 (80-100 pages) credits. A proposal for the project must be submitted in April of the junior year. Before submitting this proposal, course majors must consult with a prospective faculty supervisor. This work does not replace ENGL 099 , required of every course major. Available only if a professor is available to supervise the project. 1 - 2 credits.
This colloquium is open to senior course majors in English Literature. Focusing on the senior essay required to complete the major, this class features guest lectures by faculty and critical readings on literary theory and methodology. Short writing assignments in this class will build towards the senior essay, as students work in peer-centered environments as well as individually with the instructor. Students will complete their senior essays by the end of the fall semester. See professor to establish credit category.
ENGL 096 or ENGL 080 Humanities. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Cohen. Spring 2028 Staff. Catalog chapter: English Literature Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ENGL 101Shakespeare2
Study of Shakespeare as a dramatist. The emphasis is on the major plays, with a more rapid reading of much of the remainder of the canon. Students are advised to read widely among the plays before entering the seminar. Med/Ren Humanities. 2 credits. Spring 2027. Song.
This research-intensive seminar pays close and deep attention to a handful of major Victorian novels by authors like Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and William Thackeray. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 2 credits. Eligible for INTP, GSST
This course borrows some of the methods of new media studies to look anew at the multimedia culture of the 18th- and 19th-century United States. We will study newspapers, maps, wampum, photographs, songbooks, advertisements, and counterfeit money, alongside literary texts that thematize this rich media culture. 18th/19th c. Humanities. 2 credits.
What can the radical thinking and practice of the past teach us about the political possibilities of today? This course explores the explosion of anti-slavery, Black radical, sex radical, socialist, communist, and anarchist writing in and around the nineteenth-century US. It looks to these past radicalisms not only as forerunners of present ones, but also for models of revolutionary world-making that may appear strange, irrational, or incomprehensible from the point of view of the present. We will read primary texts across a range of genres, as well as a selection of critical texts to help us theorize and historicize this work. Honors Sem. Humanities 2 credits Spring 2028 Cohen. Catalog chapter: English Literature
(Cross-listed as BLST 116 ) Our focus this year will be on the long, grand, and problematic tradition of U.S. Southern literature especially fiction in both comic and tragic modes as it developed after the Civil War to the present. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 2 credits.
ENGL 117Theories and Literatures of Globalization2
This seminar examines the literary and cultural dimensions of globalization. Pairing novels and short stories by major global writers with ethnographic and historical texts, we will examine the relationship between colonialism and postcolonialism; modernity and globalization; racial formation and the nation-state. By developing a critical engagement with theories of identity and difference, we will explore the ways in which global literatures engender new politics of nationalism, race, and sexuality. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 2 credits. Eligible for GLBL-core
A study of the poetry and critical prose of Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, and H.D., in an effort to define their differences within the practice of “modernism” and to assess their significance for contemporary poetic practice. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 2 credits.
How have black writers both represented and theorized a series of tensions characterizing African American culture since the end of slavery-between past and present, roots and routes, folk and modern, sound and vision, city and country, nation and diaspora, culture and capital, people and power? Motivated by such concerns, this seminar will examine approaches to African American literature that are historical, cultural, and theoretical. Prior work in African American literature and/or Black Studies is recommended. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 2 credits. Eligible for BLST
This course is an advanced research seminar on the literatures, cultures, and theories of modernism. Central questions include: How do aspects of psychic life, such as mourning and trauma, exert pressure on literary form? Why do memory’s material traces (the archive, the photograph) enthrall the modernist imagination? What ethical or political values attend literary projects of remembering? Of forgetting? We will situate modernist literary practice alongside psychoanalytic, postcolonial, queer, and feminist critique. 20th/21st c. Humanities. Writing Course. 2 credits. Eligible for INTP, GLBL-Core Fall 2026. Patnaik. Fall 2027 Patnaik.
A major in the Honors Program may, with department permission, elect to write a thesis as a substitute for one seminar. The student must select a topic and submit a plan for department approval no later than the end of the junior year. Normally, the student writes the thesis of 80 to 100 pages, under the direction of a member of the department. The 2-credit thesis project may take place over 1 or 2 semesters. 1 - 2 credits.
Students may prepare for an honors examination in a field or major figure comparable in literary significance to those offered in the regular seminars. Independent study projects must be approved by the department and supervised by a department member. Deadlines for the receipt of written applications are the second Monday in November and the first Monday in April. 2 credits.
