Courses

• GRS EN 717: Before Class: Early Modern Distinctions
  The symbolic violence of social distinctions (gender, wealth, religion, race, occupation, learning, birth, accent, etc. etc.) among Elizabethans. Tudor-Stuart works, high and low genres from humanist philosophy to Shakespearean drama, libels, graffiti, court transcripts; social theory from Castiglione to Bourdieu.
• GRS EN 720: Conflict and Representation in Jacobean Culture
  This seminar considers the representation of social/political conflicts in the Jacobean period (1603-1625),organized around topics of sovereignty, patronage, witchcraft, gender, and the marketplace. Texts include: Macbeth, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Alchemist, King James's writings, poetry of Jonson and Donne.
• 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 726: States of Exception: Seventeenth-Century Women?s Writing and Violence
  Drawing on Agamben's analysis of the English Civil War, as well as gender and queer theory, this class explores seventeenth-century English women's writing and its afterlives. In particular, we consider the importance of wartime violence to these women's writing.
• 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 731: Global Romanticism
  Interdisciplinary seminar exploring new visions of the global and the planetary in Romantic-era literature, artworks, museums, and collections, in relation to encounters with Indigenous people and their cultural productions, and writings by leading European figures across emerging disciplines.
• GRS EN 735: The Satanic School: Byron and the Shelleys Unbound
  The work of the "Satanic School" of writers--Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley--during their collaborative post-Waterloo period. Readings include the major shorter works as well as Prometheus Unbound, Frankenstein, and portions of Childe Harold and Don Juan.
• GRS EN 736: Race + Reunion
  Examines the intertwined themes of race and rebellion in nineteenth-century American literature, including the antebellum anxieties over intersectional conflict, the societal implications of the Civil War, and the postbellum challenges of Reconstruction and interracial reconciliation.
• 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 745: Accounting for Literature in 19th-Century America and Britain
  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: 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 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.
• GRS EN 755: Charles Dickens and George Eliot
  How do the formal innovations of two Victorian novelists reflect transformations in society? Readings include Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Middlemarch.
• GRS EN 766: Milton Now
  Explores Milton's work and the current formation of "Milton studies," focusing on four interrelated topics: modes of reading, historicism, secularism, and gender and sexuality. Asks how and why we read Milton now, engaging conversations about the fate of the humanities.
• GRS EN 771: The Novel in Theory and History
  An inquiry into the state of novel theory today and the problem of accounting for the emergence of prose fiction in male and female, Christian and non-Christian, Western and Eastern, Neoclassical and Enlightenment authors between 1650 and 1800.
• GRS EN 777: American Popular Writing
  Survey of best-selling writing (fiction, poetry, journalism, and otherwise) from the American Revolution to late nineteenth century. Questions of race, class, gender, literary conventionality, canonicity, sentimentalism and "reform." Possible authors include Rowson, Cooper, Douglass, Stowe, Alger, Longfellow, Barnum, Twain.
• GRS EN 779: Modernism: Text and Screen
  Multiple relays between the experiments of modernist literature and the emergence of film. How did early film challenge ideas of art, subjectivity, narration, description? Texts by Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, and more, alongside films by Bunuel, Ivens, Pabst, Deren, and Keaton.
• GRS EN 780: American Modernisms: Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore
  Two modernists responding to changing ideas about the relation of mind and world. How did they rethink the lyric "I" or the demand for civic poetry? Close reading of poems, with reference to broader modernist aesthetics and visual arts.
• GRS EN 782: Faulkner in Context
  Faulkner's fiction as works that reflect, absorb, engage, and help constitute the discursive environments of his time. Faulkner as modernist wrestling with new technologies; regionalist in a globalized world; ex- colonial writer; agrarian critic of modern capitalism; chronicler of environmental degradation.

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