English

• GRS EN 604: History of Criticism 1
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing.
  Survey of major philosophical discussions of literature from ancient Greece to the late nineteenth century. Figures include Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche. Themes include art's relation to truth, ethics, and politics; interpretation; aesthetic judgment; the sublime.
• GRS EN 606: Literary Criticism II
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing.
  Survey of literary critical perspectives and trends in humanistic theory relevant to literary interpretation from the middle of the twentieth century onward, including formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, gender studies, new historicism, and post-colonial studies. Frequent writing assignments of varying lengths.
• GRS EN 665: Critical Studies in Literature and Society Topic for Fall 2011: Enlightenment In America
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing.
  A literary introduction to some varieties of Enlightenment in the Americas. Reading essays, sermons, novels, poems, and objects produced between 1690 and 1845, course traces the ideologies and technologies of "Progress" in Britain's Colonies, the Caribbean, and the United States
• GRS EN 666: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing.
  Topics vary.
• GRS EN 668: Critical Studies in British Literature
  Two topics are offered for 2010-2011. Topic for Fall 2010: Literature and Science. While literature and science turn different lenses on the world, both disciplines identify patterns and construct narratives of change over time. This course explores microscopic worlds, vast cosmoses, evolution and ecology; writers include Swift, Tennyson, Darwin, Twain, and Pynchon. Topic for Spring: Time and Literature, 1800-1930. We examine models of time (pace, narrative, scale) in Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist texts during major transformations in science and technology (geology, dinosaurs, Darwin, railways, film, and Einstein). Authors include Byron, Tennyson, Hardy, Wells, Proust, and Woolf.
• GRS EN 674: Critical Studies in Literary Genres
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing.
  Topic for Spring 2011: Transatlantic Crossings. Examination of 19th century American and European travel narratives, focusing on the questions of American identity, mobility, discovery, and imperialism. Authors include Jefferson, Tocqueville, Stowe, Dickens, Kemble, Twain, James.
• GRS EN 675: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender: Representing Gender in American Literature and Film
  Gender representations in American literature, film, and graphic novels from the 1950's through the present. Works include Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, Streetcar Named Desire, Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Paris is Burning.
• GRS EN 676: Gender in Literature and Film
  Topic for Fall 2010: Representing Gender in American Literature and Film. Gender representations in American literature, film, graphic novelsâ??1950's through present. Topics: "Cultures of Consumption," "Class and Social Mobility," "Critique of Gender," "Backlash." Works: "Lolita," "Catcher in the Rye," "Streetcar Named Desire," "Diary of a Teenage Girl," "Paris is Burning."
• GRS EN 680: Critical Studies of American Writers
  Topic for Spring 2012: Pragmatism and American Literature. Major American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Du Bois, and Frost) read in relation to classical pragmatist philosophers such as William James, Peirce, Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• GRS EN 686: Studies in Anglophone Literature
  Topic for Fall 2010: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature. Examines how postcolonial writers have explored the themes of historical upheaval and modernization. We focus on the fictional and non-fictional works of V. S. Naipaul and compare them with Wole Soyinka, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, J. M. Coetzee.
• GRS EN 696: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing.
  Topic for Spring 2012: Animals and Literature Since 1800. Can we cast ourselves into the inner lives of alien creatures, from amoebas to elephants? Animals in literature and film, and theoretical shifts in the category of animal. Authors include Byron, Hardy, Darwin, Woolf, and Kafka.
• GRS EN 699: Teaching College English I
  The goals, contents, and methods of instruction in English. General teaching-learning issues. Required of all teaching fellows.
• GRS EN 706: Seminar: The Writing of Plays 2
  Graduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor, to whom one act or a full-length play must be submitted during the period just before classes begin.
  A workshop in the writing of plays. Manuscripts are read using professional actors from the Boston community, and plays are discussed in class. Individual conferences. Limited enrollment.
• GRS EN 722: Images, Icons, Iconoclasm
  The image in pre-modern erotic and religious literature. Often regarded as threatening to literate culture, images can displace words, mesmerize the imagination or replace a sacred referent. Ovid, 'Romance of the Rose,' Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Bale, Spenser.
• GRS EN 727: British Poetry from 1660 to 1780 in Cultural Context
  Major concentration on Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson. Students may choose other poets from a list including Davenant, Marvell, Cowley, Philips, Behn, Wilmot, Killigrew, Prior, Finch, Montagu, Addison, Gray, Collins, Smart, Seward.
• GRS EN 728: History and Theory of the English Novel
  The rise and development of the English novel from Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" through Austen's "Northanger Abbey," studied in relation to major works of critical theory, cultural studies, and literary history. Attention to female authors (Haywood, Burney, Austen) and contemporary reception.
• GRS EN 729: The Shelley-Byron Circle
  Life, works, historical and cultural milieu of Percy and Mary Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, concentrating on 1816-1822, with attention to the diversity of critical response. Frankenstein, Childe Harold 3 and 4, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Don Juan.
• GRS EN 733: American Enlightenment
  Literary introduction to some varieties of Enlightenment in the Americas, covering Salem witch trials, American and Haitian Revolutions, the Great Awakening, slave narratives, Gothic fictions. Works by Franklin, Equiano, Wheatley, Rush, Paine, Freneau, Copley, Jefferson, Sansay, Emerson, Poe.
• GRS EN 734: US Literature at the Turn of the Century
  Social difference, capitalism, and consumerism in the US at the turn of the 20th century, with attention to literary connections of materialism, philanthropy, literary marketplace, and cultural capital to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and political ideology.
• GRS EN 743: The Rhetoric of Culture in Victorian Britain
  Tracing the proliferation of concepts of culture over the course of the "long nineteenth century" and examining their rhetorical invocation in a variety of literary and non-literary texts. Authors: Southey, Coleridge, Mill, Martineau, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Eliot, Morris, Pater, and Wilde.