Courses

• CAS EN 530: The Romantic Age
  Studies in British literature from 1789 to 1832. Romanticism considered in light of social, aesthetic, historical, and philosophical issues. Authors may include Blake, Burke, Wollstonecraft, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, Byron, Cobbett, Scott, Clare, Mary and Percy Shelley, Keats, De Quincey, and Hazlitt.
• CAS EN 533: American Literature: Beginnings to 1855
  American literature from the beginning to the brink of the Civil War. Puritan origins, print culture, American poetic taste, entertainment, and the debate over slavery. Works by Bradstreet, Jefferson, Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Jacobs, and Melville.
• CAS EN 534: American Literature: 1855 to 1918
  American literature from the Civil War to WWI, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Tarzan of the Apes. Realism and regionalism, race and class, the history of taste and the emergence of high culture.
• CAS EN 535: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
  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.
• CAS EN 536: Twentieth-Century American Poetry
  Modernist and later twentieth American poetry, including selected long poems and shorter lyrics, with attention to poets' prose, collaborations. Crane, Williams, Stevens, Stein, Loy, O'Hara, Olson, others. Some emphasis on unusual forms and persistence of visionary poetry despite anti-romantic stances.
• CAS EN 543: The Nineteenth-Century British Novel
  The development of the novel form in its social-historical context. Authors may include Austen, Thackeray, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, and others.
• CAS EN 544: The Modern British Novel
  Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce, Rhys, Isherwood, Beckett. Emphasis on prose style; narrative craft; dialogue forms; laughter; the novelistic page of print; the political backgrounds of the first half of the twentieth century.
• CAS EN 545: The Nineteenth Century American Novel
  Development of prose fiction in the United States, with works by Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Stowe, James, Howells, and others. Topics include print culture, realism and romance, the Civil War, and sentimentalism.
• CAS EN 546: The Modern American Novel
  Topic for Fall 2013: Modernism and Modernity: History and Literature of the United States between the World Wars. Team taught look at history and literature of US in interwar (1920-1945) period, emphasizing rise of modernism as cultural response to "modern" economic, cultural, and social developments. Readings include Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, alongside historical documents and scholarship. Also offered as CAS HI 312.
• CAS EN 547: Contemporary American Fiction
  Syllabus varies from semester to semester but this course may be taken only once for credit. Topic for Spring 2015: Major American Novels since 1984. Novels by De Lillo, Morrison, O'Brien, Oates, Roth, Lee, Alexie, K. Desai, and Diaz. Course topics include risk, multiculturalism, trauma and memory, cosmopolitanism and bilingualism.
• CAS EN 551: English Drama to 1590
  Mystery, Morality, Interludes, and the first rollicking public-stage plays. Piety, blasphemy, scatological humor, horrific violence, trans-gendering, black magic, bad verse, and politically-incorrect fun, from Anonymous to early Shakespeare, including the bad-boy playwrights of London's first mass-entertainment industry.
• CAS EN 561: Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
  A reading of some of the Canterbury Tales and several books of Troilus and Criseyde, emphasizing the rhetorical strategies with which Chaucer attempted to turn the linguistic, social, political, religious, and cultural chaos of fourteenth-century England into courtly amusement.
• CAS EN 566: Milton
  Explores John Milton's prose and poetry in the context of both the seventeenth century and our current critical moment. Issues include religious liberty, gender, republicanism, genre, sexuality, slavery, friendship, English civil wars, ecocriticism, career anxiety, and changing ideas of reading.
• CAS EN 568: Studies in British Literature
  Topic for Spring 2015: Shakespeare and Film. Study of Shakespeare's tragedies, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, in multiple film versions of each play by such directors as Olivier, Welles, Nunn, Eyre, Branagh, Luhrmann, Taymor, and Kurosawa. Previous study of Shakespeare recommended.
• CAS EN 571: Special Topics in American Literature
  Topic for Fall 2012: American Poetry to 1860. An in-depth exploration of American poetry from its beginnings to the Civil War, unfolding according to historical principles and paying special attention to the cultural impacts of verse. Authors studied include Bradstreet, Taylor, Wheatley, Emerson, Poe, Harper, Whitman, and others.
• CAS EN 572: Studies in American Literary Movements
  Topic for Fall 2013: Transnational American Studies. Drawing on examples from literature, history, art, photography, and architecture, this course explores the global origins of American culture. Topics include the immigrant experience; tourism; internationalism; and cultural crossings between Japan and the US in the late nineteenth century. Also offered as CAS AM 501.
• CAS EN 575: Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Fall 2012: Queer Literature and Film. An overview of same-sex attraction in literature from the Greeks to the present. Readings: Whitman, Dickinson, Radclyffe Hall, Wilde, Forster, Winterson, Hollinghurst, others. Queer identities in film from the silent period to the twenty-first century. Weekly screenings.
• CAS EN 576: Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Spring 2013: Seventeenth-Century English Women Writers. Explores the fascinating world of war, sex, revolution, slavery and religion that was the English seventeenth century through the writings of women, including Halkett, Cavendish, Hutchinson, Philips, Behn, and others. Readings include exquisite poetry, hilarious plays, quirky romances and awe-inspiring pamphlets.
• CAS EN 578: Studies in British Writers
  Topic for Fall 2014: Virginia Woolf. A careful examination of one of the most enigmatic, challenging, and consistently astonishing writers of the modern era. Students read a thorough selection of Woolf's fiction and exploratory essays, while contemplating recurrent problems of subjectivity, experimentalism, metaphor, gender, and history.
• CAS EN 579: Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Fall 2014: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. Whitman and Dickinson as unruly eccentrics and as wholly representative nineteenth-century American writers, in the context of Emerson's call for a literature that embraces "the common." A course in cultural history and in close reading.

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