Courses

• CAS EN 363: Shakespeare I
  Six plays chosen from the following: Richard II, Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter's Tale. Some attention to the sonnets.
• CAS EN 364: Shakespeare II
  Six or seven plays chosen from the following: Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.
• 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. Topic for Fall 2016: Toni Morrison's American Times. Examines four of the Nobel Laureate's novels, using primary and secondary materials to construct historical contexts and critical perspectives. Also offered as CAS AA 305.
• CAS EN 372: Politics and Culture in Britain, 1660-1759
  Introduction to British politics, philosophy, religion, society, and literature, 1660-1759. Many modern ideas, including democracy and individual liberty, had their origins in these years; literary works include slashing satire, sparkling comedy, wicked obscenity, and profound meditations on human nature. Also offered as CAS HI 357.
• 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 2016: Black Humor. What is funny about death and suffering? Fiction and film responding to the absurdity of mortal existence with savage hilarity. Readings by Swift, O'Connor, Beckett, Nabokov; films include Kind Hearts and Coronets, Harold and Maude, Dr. Strangelove, Brazil. Weekly screenings. Also offered as CAS CI 390 A1.
• 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 2016: 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 390: Topics in Comparative Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Two topics are offered Fall 2016. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: 1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination. What is The Thousand and One Nights? How has this ever-expanding collection appealed to its diverse audiences? Focus on Nights' structure and themes, notable translations and offshoots in western literature and art, and later appropriations by Arab and Muslim writers. Also offered as CAS LY 441 A1 and CAS XL 441 A1. Section B1: King Arthur Exploded: Beyond Boundaries. Tradition and innovation in works of literature, paintings, and films inspired by King Arthur's court (6th-21st centuries). Themes include spiritual and erotic love; history and imagination; conquest and nationalism; memory and forgetting; tropes of quest; sin and redemption. Conducted in English. Also offered as CAS LF 430 A1 and CAS XL 384 A1.
• 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. Writers include Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Johnson, Hegel, Nietzsche, Du Bois, Freud; questions of truth, rhetoric, pleasure, selfhood, politics.
• 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 465: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Fall 2015: Modernity/Shakespeare/Film. Filmed adaptations of Shakespeare in contrasting "Renaissance" and contemporary styles. How is the past imagined? What are the functions of nostalgia? How is modernity represented? Plays read alongside multiple films as well as theories of performance, reception, and visual pleasure. Also offered as CAS CI 465.
• 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 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 475: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Spring 2016: 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 WS 305 D1 and CAS XL 381 C1.

Back to full list of College of Arts & Sciences