English

• CAS EN 509: Playwriting 1: Analysis to Inspiration
  A seminar in the fundamentals of dramatic form, structure, characterization, and theme. Students read and discuss playwrights such as Brecht, Chekhov, and Shepard and, through written exercises, develop their individual plays.
• 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 705: Seminar: The Writing of Plays 1
  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 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 717: Before Class: Early Modern Distinctions
  The symbolic violence of social distinctions in Elizabethan culture: gender, wealth, religion, race, occupation, learning, birth, accent, etc. Major and minor Tudor-Stuart works; humanist philosophy and Shakespearean drama alongside libels, graffiti, and court transcripts; social theory from Castiglione to Bourdieu.
• GRS EN 722: Medieval Performance
  Introduction to performance culture in the four centuries before Shakespeare. Reads liturgical and sacramental ritual, guild and court drama, civic and royal pageant, heresy trials, lyric poetry and song, through terms developed by contemporary language and performance theory.
• GRS EN 723: (In)subordination and Early Modern English Literature
  Resistance to authority in literary and non-literary texts by poets, playwrights, and ordinary people. Attention to non-aesthetic texts as well as to major works by Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood and others.
• GRS EN 724: Old Age in Early Modern Literature
  An introduction to the discipline and practice of "literary gerontology" or age studies through a survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean representations of late life. Attention to relevant classical and continental resources as well as modern critical contexts.
• GRS EN 725: English Secular Lyric of the Seventeenth Century
  Faced with authorial challenges posed by ascendant female writers, how did male poets in seventeenth- century England defensively conceive, construct, and maintain a "masculine line" in secular lyrics? Hetero- and homosocial relations in Donne, Jonson, Drayton, Carew, Herrick, Marvell, Rochester, others.
• GRS EN 727: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry
  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 730: Modern Long Poem
  The long poem as sequence, notebook, atypical research, non-novel, nearly genreless book: excerpts and sometimes whole works by Crane, Williams, Stein, Pound, Loy, Auden, Prince, Zukofsky, Olson, Hill, Howe, and others, American and British.
• GRS EN 732: The Literature of Atlantic Modernity, 1700-1900
  A theoretical and historical examination of transatlantic literature, with a focus on capitalism, aesthetics, and print culture. Readings in Marx, Weber, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson, Paul Gilroy, Defoe, Franklin, Wheatley, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Irving, Bronte, Melville, and James.
• GRS EN 734: Social Difference and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism in American Literature
  Against the backdrop of recent scholarship, the course examines how Cahan, Howells, James, Wharton, Dreiser, and Dunbar indexed materialism, philanthropy, literary marketplace, and cultural capital in terms of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and political ideology.
• GRS EN 741: Money and Marriage in American Fiction, 1796-1925
  Marriage as literary plot, legal contract, market commodity, sexual arrangement, gendered constraint, in American fiction from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with background readings in law, economics, history, criticism. Authors include Foster, Phelps, Howells, Hopkins, Wharton, James, Fitzgerald.
• GRS EN 742: Knowing and Judging
  What is the status of aesthetic and interpretive claims? Are they rational, cognitive, or calculative? Are they expressions of preference, emotion, ideology, wisdom? Readings in aesthetics from Kant onwards, including Cavell, Fried, Gadamer, Sontag, Jameson, affect theory, Digital Humanities.
• 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 746: The South in Modern American Fiction
  Exploration of how US South figured in imagining national modernity. Modernism as problematic with Southern bent: Faulkner, Welty, Toomer, Erskine Caldwell, Hurston, R.P. Warren, Wright, O'Connor. Equal attention to broad, systematic examination of scholarship on major topics in modernism.
• GRS EN 751: Accounting for Literature in 19th-Century America and Britain
  Nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature in light of the era's accelerating production of books and information. What happens to aesthetics, intuition, and affect in an age of quantification, statistics, and textual abundance? Readings from Poe, Dickens,Trollope, Melville, African-American press, and others.
• GRS EN 753: Race and Cosmopolitanism in American Literature, 1875-1975
  Race (alongside culture and class) in literary approaches to cosmopolitanism from Henry James to James Baldwin. American writers grappling with national belonging, global citizenship, affiliation and alienation. Readings include Douglass, Wharton, Locke, Fauset, Stein, and recent theories of cosmopolitanism.
• GRS EN 754: 1950's America
  This course moves beyond Consumption, Cold War, and Conformity, to explore the 1950's as a decade of cultural and political ferment, when original works of literature, film, and social theory--Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, films of Marlon Brando, books by de Beauvoir, Arendt, Mills, Riesman--reached wide audiences.

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