Courses

• CAS EN 322: British Literature I
  Beginnings of English literature from Anglo-Saxon period to end of the seventeenth century. Topics include the development of various poetic forms, medieval romance, and British drama. Authors may include Chaucer, Kempe, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, and Milton.
• CAS EN 323: British Literature II
  Overview of English literature between 1700 and 1900. Topics include London as urban center, modern prose fiction, Romantic and Victorian poetry, tensions between religion and science. Authors may include Pope, Swift, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, Wilde.
• CAS EN 324: Topics in Medieval Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change. Topic for Spring 2018: Bad-mouthing in the Middle Ages. English translations of French, Latin, Icelandic, Middle English texts, from Prudentius to Chaucer, whose works are treated as the comic culmination of the course.
• CAS EN 325: Topics in Early Modern British Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for Fall 2018: Literature of the European Renaissance: Controlled Chaos. Cultural reconstructions of class, gender, sexuality, religion, and race as reflected in sixteenth-century European literature, with supplementary attention to the period's visual arts. Authors include More, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Rabelais, Bartolome, Teresa of Avila, Vasari, Montaigne, Franco, Marlowe, and Fonte.
• CAS EN 326: Arts of Gender
  Examines representations of gender and sexuality in diverse art forms, including drama, dance, film, and literature, and how art reflects historical constructions of gender. Topic for Spring 2019: Gender Trouble/ Genre Trouble. Through readings of plays, poetry, novels and graphic novels, as well as film, television and other media, examines how various genres have been used to explore, challenge and reimagine gender over centuries. Theoretical perspectives include feminist, queer, transgender, and intersex.
• CAS EN 327: Topics in American Literature
  Topics vary. Topic for Fall 2018: Jane Eyre's Sisters. A close study of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is followed by a look at 19th and 20th century writers who appropriate and revise aspects of Bronte's novel in an American context. Authors include Jacobs, Alcott, Stoddard, Rhys and Mukherjee. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration. Topic for Spring 2019: Transnationalism and American Literature. Challenging nationalist assumptions, this course traces the development of U.S. literature by exploring the formative impact of the immigrant experience; the middle passage; expatriation; black internationalism; translation; and transpacific exchange. Readings by Crevecoeur, James, Cather, Stein, Hughes, Wright, and others.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
• CAS EN 331: Topics in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change. Topic for Fall 2018: Around the World in the Long 19th Century. Explores how novels, poetry, nonfiction and other cultural forms like the panorama, the museum, and the public exhibition shaped new visions of the global and the planetary in the long nineteenth century. Topic for Spring 2019: The Nineteenth-Century British Novel. With their grisly murders, secret marriages, and fallen women, nineteenth-century British novels were complex, tightly-plotted, and gripping. Traces the development of the classic novel in a range of genres. Authors include Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy.
• CAS EN 333: American Literature: Beginnings to Civil War
  American literature from the beginnings to the Civil War. Readings include works by major authors such as Bradstreet, Jefferson, Franklin, Irving, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Douglass, Whitman, and Jacobs. Cannot be taken for credit in addition to CAS EN 533.
• CAS EN 334: American Literature: Civil War to World War I
  American literature from the Civil War to the end of World War I in 1918. Changing literary forms in the age of Reconstruction, robber barons, the New Woman, westward expansion. Authors may include Whitman, Alger, Twain, James, Crane, Wharton, Chesnutt.
• CAS EN 341: History of the Novel in English
  An introduction to the history of the Anglophone novel, from its origins in early modern England to its status as the dominant literary form of modernity. Readings include Defoe, Austen, Dickens, James, Woolf, Morrison, and Coetzee.
• CAS EN 344: Modern British Fiction
  British and Irish fiction from the early 20th century to decades after WWII. Topics include modernism, historical and political ruptures, experiments in style and narrative, waning British colonialism. Authors may include Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Conrad, Rhys, Isherwood, Beckett, Naipaul, Ishiguru.
• CAS EN 345: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
  Development of prose fiction in the United States, often including works by Child, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Stowe, Webb, Dreiser, Gilman, and others. Topics include print culture, realism and romance, the Civil War, and sentimentalism. Cannot be taken for credit in addition to CAS EN 545.
• CAS EN 347: Topics in Contemporary Fiction
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for Fall 2018: Contemporary US Fiction. Survey of major American fiction since World War II. Authors include Roth, Baldwin, O'Connor, DeLillo, Pynchon, Morrison, Ozick, Erdrich. Topics include "disenchantment," commercialism, technology, paranoia, selfhood, community, fiction and world-making. Topic for Spring 2019: Post-1990 Anglophone Literature. The ways in which international works of fiction depict social change and their effects on individuals and communities. Authors discussed may include Adichie, Adiga, Muenuddin, Coetzee, Knausgaard, Dangarembga.
• CAS EN 348: Topics in Modern Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for fall 2017: Modern Irish Writers. Poetry, plays, and fiction by Irish authors from 1890s to present. Writers may include Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney, Muldoon, Boland.
• CAS EN 355: Drama and Performance, 1840 - 1945
  Explores the relationship between modern drama and the construction of Western "modernity" through plays and critical texts. Involves the study of dramatic realism, expressionism, symbolism, minstrelsy, epic theater and its relation to the rise of racial formation, colonialism, or reconfigurations of gender and class.
• CAS EN 356: Drama and Performance, 1945 - Present
  Theater history and performance art from 1945 to today. Analysis of plays through the lens of performance theory, blurring the line between the aesthetic and the social. Playwrights may include Beckett, Ionesco, Williams, Albee, Soyinka, Deveare Smith, Kushner, Parks.
• 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 2018: 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.

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