Courses

• 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. Two topics are offered Fall 2018. Section A1: Section A1: The Novel After Film: This course asks what it has meant to write in the shadow of film. How has film's formal novelty and popular ascendance changed the way novels have been conceived? Auster, Delillo, De Witt, Keaton, Kurosawa, Hitchcock and more. Also offered as CAS CI 390 A1. Section B1: Comic Geniuses: Sturges/Anderson. Intensive study of films written and directed by two comic geniuses, Preston Sturges and Wes Anderson. Readings in theories of comedy, literature, and film criticism relevant to their comic styles and subject matter. Weekly screenings. Also offered as CAS CI 390 B1. Topic for Spring 2019: Film Noir. Intensive study of film noir in both its classic and revisionist periods, informed by readings in hard-boiled detective fiction. Topics include: gender divisions, fatal plotting, the death drive, sex and cigarettes. Weekly screenings.
• 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 386: Topics in Anglophone Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for Fall 2018: Postcolonial Theater. Study of 20th-century Irish, Nigerian, Caribbean, and South African theater; questions of national styles, language and dialect, relations with metropolitan centers of power.
• CAS EN 389: Fictional Forms
  Topic for Fall 2017: 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 and 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. Topic for Spring 2019: Conceptualizations of the Imagination. What constitutes the "imagination" in literature? How does it manifest in literary forms and media? Examines works from the English, Chinese, and Japanese traditions, and explores how language grants readers access to literary consciousness.
• CAS EN 393: Technoculture and Horizons of Gender and Race
  Explores new media theory, postmodernist thought, social media, and video games to confront gender, race, and sexuality. Through critical reading, writing, and hands-on digital technology use, students consider how race, sexuality, and gender live in virtual worlds. Also offered as CAS WS 393.
• 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 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 2017: Hamlet/Lear/Macbeth: Appropriation and Performance. Historical context, performance histories, and appropriations and transformations of Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. Films, novels, plays from England, France, Germany, Russia, Australia, Japan, and the US. Theoretical analysis of intertextuality, cultural politics, canon formation, globalization of culture.
• CAS EN 466: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Fall 2017: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. This course considers the first century of black Atlantic literature, including poetry and prose by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and Frederick Douglass. How did these writers represent the early modern world? How did they work to change it? Also offed as CAS AA 501 A1.
• CAS EN 471: Critical Studies in American Literary Movements
  Topic for Fall 2018: Modernity in the Atlantic World. An "Atlantic Studies" introduction focusing on the historical conditions that unite Britain and America in a single, though internally various, culture. Readings include Gilroy, Bailyn, Ellison, Roach, Defoe, Paine, Equiano, Douglass, Dickens, and James.
• CAS EN 474: Critical Studies in Literary Genres
  Topic for Spring 2018: 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 300 A1 and CAS XL 381 A1.
• CAS EN 475: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Spring 2019: Marriage and Money in American Fiction. 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.
• CAS EN 482: Critical Studies in Modern Literature
  Topic for Fall 2018: Approaches to the Postcolonial Novel. Modern stories from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. An introduction to historical background and critical approaches to the works of authors such as Amos Tutuola, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, and Daniyal Mueenudin.
• CAS EN 483: Critical Studies in Literature and Ethnicity
  Topics vary.
• CAS EN 484: Critical Studies in Literature and Ethnicity
  Topic for Fall 2017: African American and Asian American Women Writers. Cross-cultural comparison of selected African American and Asian American women writers examines strategies by the "Other" to navigate cultural constructions of race, class, and gender. Attention to literary histories. Also offered as CAS AA 504.
• CAS EN 491: Independent Study
  Application forms available in CAS Room 105.

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