Courses

• CAS EN 370: Introduction to African American Women Writers
  Examines the African American female literary tradition through selected texts by African American women, written from slavery to the present. Critical scholarship that interrogates race, gender, and class and examines literary history provides the larger context for discussion of these works. Also offered as CAS EN 370.. Also offered as CAS AA 304.
• CAS EN 373: Detective Fiction
  A study of the major writers in the history of literary crime and detection, mainly British and American, with attention to the genre's cultural contexts and development from the eighteenth century to the present.
• CAS EN 375: Topics in Literature and Film
  Major themes and techniques explored by both writers and filmmakers. May be repeated for credit as topics change. Topic for Fall 2013: On The Road in American Literature and Film. Explores the various motivations for and consequences of taking to the road. Works may include Ford's Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man, Housekeeping, The Wild One, The Fugitive Kind, Catcher in the Rye, Thelma and Louise, Boys Don't Cry. Topic for Spring 2014: The Mother Figure in Literature and Film. A study of literature and film with prominent maternal figures, from monster moms to model mothers. Weekly screenings.
• CAS EN 377: Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
  This study of the Harlem Renaissance (1919-1935) focuses on literature with overviews of the stage, the music, and the visual arts. Authors include Du Bois, Locke, Garvey, Schuyler, Hurston, McKay, Larsen, Fisher, Hughes, Cullen. Also offered as CAS AA 507.
• CAS EN 379: American Poetry
  A survey of American poetry, from the Revolutionary era up through the post-WWII period, introducing the fundamentals of poetic form and lyric practice, as well as the historical and cultural contexts surrounding the development of Romanticism, Modernism, and beyond.
• CAS EN 380: Twentieth-Century African American Novel
  Topic for Spring 2013: Transformations of Genre in the Twentieth-Century African American Novel. Major works drawn from the Harlem Renaissance, Realism, Modernism, the Black Arts Movement, and the contemporary period. Authors may include Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright, Anne Petry, Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, John Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison. Also offered as AA 502.
• CAS EN 389: Fictional Forms
  Topic for Fall 2014: The Gothic: Monsters, Myths, History. Survey of Gothic as a narrative form (by contrast with the realistic novel) with attention to history (as a Gothic narrative) and modern myths (Frankenstein's monster, vampire, zombie, cyborg). Nineteenth & twentieth-century fiction primarily, with an eye on today throughout.
• CAS EN 401: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS EN 402: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS EN 404: Literary Criticism I
  A historical survey of western literary-critical standards from the earliest surviving formulations in classical Athens to the dawn of the twentieth century, with particular attention to the shifting cultural contexts that shape this development.
• CAS EN 405: Advanced Writing of Fiction
  The writing of short stories and perhaps longer fiction. Manuscripts read and discussed in class. Individual conferences.
• CAS EN 406: Literary Criticism II
  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 length.
• CAS EN 463: Hamlet/Macbeth: Appropriation and Performance
  Analysis of these plays through historical context, performance histories, and contemporary dramatic and prose appropriations. Theoretical considerations of adaptation and appropriation, including such topics as intertextuality, performance as interpretation, cultural politics, canon formation, and the global marketplace of culture.
• CAS EN 468: Critical Studies in British Literature
  Topic for Fall 2014: Humanism & Novel. Instead of following the history of the novel from the eighteenth century forward, this course looks backward, tracing the modern novel (Defoe, Haywood, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, and Austen) back to Renaissance and early modern Humanism and the Deist movement.
• CAS EN 471: Critical Studies in American Literary Movements
  Topic for Fall 2012: Modernity in the Atlantic World. An "Atlantic Studies" introduction focusing on the historical conditions that unite Britain and America in a single, though internally various, culture. Readings include Gilroy, Bailyn, Ellison, Roach, Defoe, Paine, Equiano, Douglass, Dickens, and James.
• CAS EN 472: Critical Studies in American Literary Movements
  Topic for Spring 2015: Transnational Modernism. Explores how internationalization shaped the emergence of modernism in fiction, poetry, and visual art in the U.S. and Caribbean. Close analysis of texts informed by theories of cosmopolitanism, translation, vernacular and print culture, primitivism, creolization, world history, and transpacific exchange.
• CAS EN 474: Critical Studies in Literary Genres
  Topic for Spring 2014: Genre Theory. Genre as a category of literary and discursive analysis; selected theories of two exemplary literary genres, poetry and the novel; major 20th- and 21st-century theories of genre from "neoclassical" classificatory approaches through rhetorical genre studies and activity theory.
• CAS EN 475: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Fall 2013: Early Modern Women Authors. A survey of European women writers from the 1400s to the early 1600s, and of the modern critical thinking that has redefined their literary-historical importance. Christine de Pizan, Theresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Gaspara Stampa, Elizabeth I, and others. Also offered as CAS XL 470 B1.
• CAS EN 476: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Spring 2015: Sex, Gender, and the Body in Medieval Literature. Focusing on the medieval era, this course explores the history of sexuality and gendered identities, as well as sexuality's radical potential to disrupt and transform bodies and selves over time. Medieval literature, alongside critical readings in gender and sexuality studies.
• CAS EN 480: Critical Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Fall 2014: Pragmatism and Literature. Major American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Henry James, Crane, Du Bois, and Frost) read in relation to classical pragmatist philosophers such as William James, Peirce, Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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