Courses

  • GRS EN 671: 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.
  • GRS EN 674: 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.
  • GRS EN 675: 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.
  • GRS EN 682: 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.
  • GRS EN 684: Crst Lit&Ethnic
  • GRS EN 695: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
    Topic for Fall 2017: Time and Literature 1800-1930. From 1800-1930, momentous changes in technology (railway, telegraph, photography) and science (geology, Darwin, Einstein) inspired a re-conception of time.Course examines narrative time in Byron, Wordsworth, Hardy, Woolf, and Proust in relation to these strange new ideas about time.
  • GRS EN 696: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
    Topic for Spring 2018: Fables and Tales. Stories have designs on you. How the "grammar" of storytelling shapes meaning in stories from Aesop's Fables, The Arabian Nights, the Grimms' Household Tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Boccaccio's Decameron, and some contemporary sources.
  • 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 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 721: Three Big Books: Uncle Tom's Cabin; Moby Dick; Bleak House
    Three of the best novels ever written, all published 1851-3, read carefully in historical and cultural context. Realism and sentimentality; race, class and gender stereotypes and hierarchies; transatlantic book history; narrative innovation; hybridity and intertextuality; representing a nation.
  • GRS EN 722: Medieval Perf
    This course description is currently under construction.
  • 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 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 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 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 732: Modern Atlantic
    This course description is currently under construction.
  • 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.

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