English & American Literature Undergraduate Courses

Required for all undergraduate degrees. Reinforces basic skills in communication necessary for college work. Instruction and practice in fundamentals of critical writing, reading, and thinking. Lectures combined with seminars on vital current social, political, psychological, and philosophical issues. Students choose their seminars. Frequent papers; individual conferences.   [ 4 cr. ]

Does not give concentration credit. Practice in writing narration, exposition, argument and persuasion, the critical essay, and the research paper. Related readings. Class discussion of papers. Individual conferences. Students enroll in specific seminars. Limited enrollment.   [ 4 cr. ]

Designed mainly for those with little or no experience in creative writing. An introduction to writing in various genres: poetry, fiction, and plays. Students' works discussed in class. Limited enrollment.   [ 4 cr. ]

Competitive admission, limited enrollment. Note: Obtain syllabus at Creative Writing Program Office (236 Bay State Rd.) before end of fall semester. Intensive study of American writers and of writing by participants. Students write and present at least one story or chapter and read writings of others.   [ 4 cr. ]

Organization and techniques for effective verbal and written communication in the business environment. Emphasis on developing communication skills through practical written and oral assignments.  [ 4 cr. ]

Representative fiction, poetry, and drama from modern Continental, British, and American writers. Primarily for students not concentrating in English.   [ 4 cr. ]

Selected American writers from the Colonial period to the present. Prose and poetry representative of the American tradition. Primarily for students not concentrating in English.  [ 4 cr. ]

Representative English and American novels from the eighteenth century to the present. Required papers. Primarily for students not concentrating in English.  [ 4 cr. ]

Critical reading of representative English and American poems. Primarily for students not concentrating in English.  [ 4 cr. ]

Critical reading of representative plays from the ancient Greeks to the present. Primarily for students not concentrating in English.  [ 4 cr. ]

Survey and analysis of cinema as an expressive medium from the silent period to the present. Films are screened weekly and discussed in conjunction with works of literature.   [ 4 cr. ]

Fundamentals of literary analysis and interpretation. Intensive study of selected literary texts. Frequent papers. Limited class size. 4 cr  [ 4 cr. ]

  [ 4 cr. ]

Competitive admission, limited enrollment. Note: Obtain syllabus at Creative Writing Program Office (236 Bay State Rd.) before end of fall semester. Intensive study of American writers and of writing by participants. Students write and present at least one story or chapter and read writings of others.   [ 4 cr. ]

Prereq: MET HU 221. British literature from its beginnings to the Restoration.   [ 4 cr. ]

British literature from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century.  [ 4 cr. ]

A century's transformations of drama and stage. Reading and discussion of plays from early realism and expressionism to the theatre of the absurd and present trends: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Pirandello, Brecht, Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, and others.  [ 4 cr. ]

Modern to contemporary drama since about 1950. Beckett, Genet, Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, Arden, Stoppard, Durrenmatt, Grass, Weiss, Handke, Albee, Miller, Williams, Shepard, and others. Related readings in predecessors, such as Kleist and Artaud, and in less well known contemporaries.  [ 4 cr. ]

Six plays chosen from the following: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV (Part 1), Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter's Tale.  [ 4 cr. ]

Six plays chosen from the following: Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.   [ 4 cr. ]

Origins and development of the detective and crime genres in England and America, including works of Collins, Poe, Dickens, Doyle, Christie, Sayers, and Chandler, among others.   [ 4 cr. ]

Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Emphasis on readings, but the course deals with romanticism both as an historical movement and as a cultural category significantly connected to modernism.   [ 4 cr. ]

Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Emphasis on readings, but the course deals with romanticism both as an historical movement and as a cultural category significantly connected to modernism.   [ 4 cr. ]

Close reading of balladic, lyric, and longer poems by Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence, Auden, Rosenberg, Mew, Loy, MacDiarmid, Gurney, Douglas, Larkin, Hill, Harrison, Prynne, others. Poets' essays and opposed schools and approaches. Reference to other arts, and times of political tragedy.  [ 4 cr. ]

Study of five or six poets from the following: Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Frost, Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Ammons, Ashbery, Plath, Ginsberg, Merrill.  [ 4 cr. ]

The novel from Scott to Hardy. Among the works to be discussed: Scott's Waverley, Austen's Emma, Dickens's Bleak House, Eliot's Middlemarch, Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Hardy's Jude the Obscure.  [ 4 cr. ]

Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford, Forster, Beckett, and other novelists of the period 1895-1956.   [ 4 cr. ]

From 1900 to the present, including Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and selected contemporary novelists.   [ 4 cr. ]

Study of American postmodern fiction and culture since 1950; includes works by Atwood, Barthelme, Burroughs, Coover, DeLillo, Nabokov, Pynchon, and others.   [ 4 cr. ]

"Classics of British and American Literature" is designed to teach some of the classic books of English-language literature, including several of those most widely read in American high schools, as well as some authoritative literary criticism on each of these works, their authors and genres. The course will include selected poems, short stories, and essays, as well as novels and provide historical background for each work and biographical information about the author. We will look at some film versions of the works studied. The course explicitly introduces students to issues and controversies concerning the nature and purpose of literature curricula in schools. These include the idea of a "classic," a literary canon, and a "high" culture, as opposed to or different from popular, commercial, contemporary, and utilitarian uses and forms of literature. Texts: Shakespeare, Julius Caesar; Douglass, Narrative; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Wharton, Ethan Frome; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Essays: Lincoln, Emerson,Thoreau. Short Stories: Hemingway, Anderson, Roth, Updike, Oates, Gordimer. Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Owen, Larkin. Note: Course does not count for the English major.   [ 4 cr. ]

The heritage of Marlow and Shakespeare: the collapse of a historic world; Jacobean pessimism and decadence in the plays of Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford, and others.  [ 4 cr. ]

Major voices since 1980 who inherit and expand American poetic traditions, selected from Ashbery, Collins, Graham, Hecht, Komunyakaa, Kunitz, Pinsky, Wilbur, and others. Related readings in immediate predecessors such as Justice, Merrill. Opportunity for student choice of emerging poets.   [ 4 cr. ]

Introduction to major works of ancient and medieval European literatures that influenced later Continental, English, and American literature: the Bible, Homeric epic, Greek Tragedy, Virgil's Aeneid, and Dante's The Divine Comedy.  [ 4 cr. ]