Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

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  • GRS EI 901: Directed Study
    Directed study in a topic in editorial studies.
  • GRS EI 902: Directed Study
    Directed study in a topic in editorial studies.
  • GRS EN 604: History of Criticism 1
    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, Horace, Augustine, Dante, Sidney, Hume, Wordsworth, Marx, Nietzsche. 4 cr. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Aesthetic Exploration.
    • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
    • Aesthetic Exploration
  • GRS EN 606: 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 various lengths. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings.
    • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • GRS EN 665: 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.
  • GRS EN 666: 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?
  • 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 673: Critical Studies in Literary Genres
    Topics vary. Topic for Fall 2019: The Earliest Women Writers: Poets, Philosophers, and Mystics. Women's writing from ancient Greek poet Sappho (630-570 BCE) through to medieval defender of women, Christine de Pisan (1364-1430 CE). Readings by feminist critics such as Virginia Woolf, Judith Butler, Toril Moi.
  • 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. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Aesthetic Exploration.
    • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
    • Aesthetic Exploration
  • GRS EN 684: Crst Lit&Ethnic
  • GRS EN 690: Critical Studies in Comparative Literature
    Topic for Spring 2007: Theory of Literature. Literary theories represent a continuing dialogue, through which we make sense of everything we read. This course debates a series of classic issues - from dramatic realism to poetic language - in the light of theory, and literature, from ancient Greece to the present day.
  • GRS EN 695: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
    Topic for Spring 2020: Poetic Transformations: Classic to Romantic: The early modern period experienced a collision between old and new poetic orders. This course examines test cases of poetic transformation from 1650-1800, emphasizing the role of women, the working poor, and cosmopolitan skeptics in upsetting the conventions of Neoclassicism.
  • 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 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 Performance
    Race-thinking in the Middle Ages: Examines institutions and discourses (religious, economic, political, literary) that support concepts and practices of race in the medieval period. Readings include work on critical race theory; Chaucer; travel, religious and theological writings; romances; drama.

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