English

Selected problems and topics in the literature of the Middle Ages are studied.

A study of the chief genres of medieval religious literature in the later Middle Ages, with special emphasis given to the poetic formulation of popular Christian doctrine in such works as Piers Plowman and the religious poems of the "Gawain" manuscript.

The course examines in their entirety mostly short texts that advance solutions to the intellectual problems preoccupying major German religious thinkers, writers, and philosophers, viz. justification, selfhood, theodicy, play, contingency, asceticism, estrangement, malaise, authenticity.

This topics course offers seminars with a focus on climate change and/or biodiversity. Seminars under this topic examine environmental and societal issues associated with two of the key defining challenges of our time: climate change and/or biodiversity loss. The course uses a multi-disciplinary combination of perspectives and approaches grounded in the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences.

The expansion of race theory from the Americas into the global scene invites a cross-cultural approach to the fluidity of identity. This seminar investigates fiction and film from the African American, Jewish American, LGBTQ, and Israeli-Palestinian contexts to broadly explore how society constructs and deconstructs race, ethnicity, and gender. It focuses on representations of passing and reverse passing as well as doubled/split identities for a wide-ranging, comparative discussion of the political and the psychological dynamics of identity and selfhood.

A study of major topics current in the field of English early modern and renaissance studies.

A study of development, form, and content in Tudor and Stuart drama.

A study of selected major genres and modes of Renaissance literature, such as pastoral, satire, romance, picaresque, confession, lyric, epic, comedy, and tragedy. Attention is given to important cultural, social, and intellectual currents affecting their development, such as Christian Humanism, Reformation and Counter Reformation, mysticism, neo-Platonism, and skepticism. Representative works from various national literatures are chosen for close analysis.

An examination of some major writers of the period.

This course provides a critical overview of the writings of Toni Morrison. Close reading, cultural analysis, intertextuality, social theory and the African American literary tradition are emphasized.

Science fiction (SF) writing may seem a definitively modern phenomenon, but it has a rich and varied history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course, we examine early modern SF not only a vehicle for popularizing the new philosophy of the "scientific revolution," but as a space for the interrogation of competing beliefs about the relationships between humankind and the cosmos, knowledge and belief, or public and private living. Through early modern SF, we explore the self-consciously literary and poetic ways in which early modern natural philosophers worked through their ideas. No "two cultures" here.

Criticism as an applied art and as an autonomous discipline. Exploration of its place in intellectual history and a theoretical analysis of its basic assumptions. [Topics vary each year.]

A study of the principal writers, with attention given to the social, political, and philosophical backgrounds. Some consideration is given to the chief problems of 18th-century scholarship and to the history of ideas.

This seminar explores the intricate relations of poetry to history and memory in the troubled 20th century. Individual poets are closely studied for their intrinsic interest but also for their (known and still to be discovered) connections with each other. The poets are Eugenio Montale, René Char, Paul Celan, and Anne Carson, but other writers will also be called on from time to time. Questions of war and resistance are important, and above all the course attends to what one might think of as the fate of language under pressure.

A study of major 18th-century writers, genres, and critical issues.

A consideration of the primary topoi and defining oppositions of Enlightenment thought. Texts and specific focus vary from year to year.

Course explores the dynamic interplay between painting, poetry, and fiction in 19th-century France and England. The focus is twofold: painters and paintings as protagonists in novels and short stories, and paintings inspired by literature. Themes include problems of narrative, translation, and illustration; changing theories of the relative strengths of painting and literature as artistic media; realism and the importance of descriptive detail; the representation of the artist as a social (or anti-social) actor; the representation of women as artists and models; and the artist's studio as a literary trope.

A study of the major Romantic poets, with some attention given to prose.

Selected topics and problems in Romantic and Victorian literature.

A study of selected major American writers in the context of intellectual, religious, and cultural traditions.

A survey of African-American narrative and critical traditions in the context of social and cultural change. Attention is also given to the changing status of black literature in the curriculum of American colleges and universities.

A study of 20th-century American poetry.

This course examines a range of American texts written over half a century in order to clarify connections between their informing philosophies, narrative strategies, and historical moments.

A survey of issues in poetic production and reception from antiquity to the present.

A study of 19th-century English fiction, emphasizing social contexts, narrative forms, and critical theory.