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.

• 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 725: Poems for Men: English Secular Lyric of the Seventeenth Century
  Explores the relationship between male poets of seventeenth-century England and the female writers and sponsors who influenced their work including Donne, Jonson, Lanyer, Wroth, Drayton, Herrick, Carew, Lovelace, Cavendish, Marvell, Philips, and Rochester.
• 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 740: Science, Technology, Media: Race and Contemporary Criticism
  This course focuses on racial engagements with science, technology and media. Topics range from genomics to artificial intelligence, medicine and popular culture. Though rooted in literary and cultural criticism, these interdisciplinary texts will also provide an introduction to various methodologies.
• 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 742: Knowing, Feeling, and Judging
  What is the status of aesthetic and interpretive claims? Are they rational, cognitive, or calculative? Are they expressions of preference, emotion, ideology, wisdom? Readings in aesthetics from Kant onwards, including Cavell, Fried, Gadamer, Sontag, Jameson, affect theory, Digital Humanities.
• GRS EN 743: Narrative and Literary Conceptions of Time
  Pairing narrative theory with history of science, this course asks how writers from Dickens to Woolf jolt their readers out of everyday time scales, setting a human lifespan next to millions of years or a tenth of a second.
• GRS EN 744: Nineteenth-Century British Novels
  Explores classic British novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Genres include realistic novels, novels of manners, social problem novels, novels of the city, and naturalism. Will focus on the tension between human characters and the nonhuman.
• 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 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 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 783: Modernist Gothic
  Readings from Dorian Gray through Endgame, by such authors as Stoker, Conrad, Woolf, Barnes, Faulkner, Capote, Ellison, and Morrison, in relation to nineteenth-century precursors, contemporary emanations, monsters as myth, and conceptual framings from Arendt and Levi-Strauss through the posthuman. This is the same course listed as GRS EN 843 in the 2014/2015 GRS Bulletin.
• GRS EN 786: Caribbean Provocations
  Significant texts from the Anglophone Caribbean from 1912 to the present, challenging to read and to theorize. Locally inspired innovations in form, language, and perspective across genres. Likely authors: Naipaul, Harris, Kincaid, Walcott, Antoni, McKay, Goodison, Morris, Roach, Brathwaite, Johnson.

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