Courses

• 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
  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
  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.
• GRS EN 744: Less Read Nineteenth Century British Novels
  Studies in less often read major novels from the British nineteenth century, including "The Heart of Midlothian," "Mary Barton," "Hard Times," "Villette," "Daniel Deronda," and "New Grub Street." Some emphasis on cultural thickness and old sectarian groups versus modern populations.
• GRS EN 745: Information Revolutions and Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature
  What happens to literature with the rise of mass print culture, quantitative science, bureaucracy, and facticity? Poe, Dickens, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Browning, Henry James, and Wilkie Collins. Historical methods, plus some information theory, philosophy of science, and digital humanities tools.
• GRS EN 746: 1950’s America
  Beyond consumption, Cold War, conformity, this course explores the 1950's as a decade of cultural and political ferment, with literature, film, social theory-- Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, Marlon Brando films, books by de Beauvoir, Arendt, Mills, Riesman--reaching wide audiences.
• GRS EN 763: History of the English Play
  The context, social values, and formal techniques of the innovative, often bizarre, popular "historical" dramas that became authorized "history" (English, Roman, and British) for subsequent centuries. Special attention to interplay of social division, hierarchy, gender, and nation-building.
• GRS EN 775: Theories of Gender and Sexuality
  This course explores the recent history of literary critical approaches to gender and sexuality, organized around a special topic. Readings include classic and recent theoretical works, and literary texts from a range of historical periods.
• GRS EN 776: Stevens and Auden: Rhetoric and Poetry
  Modernism tried to forge a new unrhetorical language, but two radically different poets, Stevens and Auden, both "return to rhetoric" as a condition of thought and language to be exploited and reformed. Focus on public/private divide, poetry in war times.
• GRS EN 778: Succession and Early Modern Tragedy
  Early modern stagings of the logic and tragedy of succession. Readings include historical texts on Tudor- Stuart succession crises, several Shakespeare plays (incl. Lear, Macbeth), less canonical plays (Spanish Tragedy, Massacre at Paris), and contemporary letters (Queen Elizabeth, Arbella Stuart).
• GRS EN 781: Time and Narrative Since 1800
  This interdisciplinary course pairs history of science and technology with narrative theory to explore how literary texts play with time. How do geological theories, railways, industrialization and Einstein affect the pace of narrative or the feeling of simultaneity in Hardy or Woolf?

Back to full list of Graduate School of Arts & Sciences