English

• 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.
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  • 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 Spring 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings.
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  • 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 Fall 2020: 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 676: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Introduces major movements and texts in gender and sexuality studies central to literary studies. Sub-topics include race, nationhood, family, erotics, the self, public/private spheres, and literary forms. Readings include theoretical works (feminist, queer, transgender, etc.), novels, graphic novels and films.
• GRS EN 680: Critical Studies of American Writers
  Topic for Spring 2012: Pragmatism and American Literature. Major American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Du Bois, and Frost) read in relation to classical pragmatist philosophers such as William James, Peirce, Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• GRS EN 682: Critical Studies in Modern Literature
  Introduction to philosophical and historical approaches to the study of global literature outside Europe and North America. Themes addressed include individual and social development, historical reflection, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, cultural identity, the impact of socio- economic forces Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings and Aesthetic Exploration.
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  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • Aesthetic Exploration
• GRS EN 683: Critical Studies in Literature and Ethnicity
  Topic for Spring 2020: Multiethnic Women's Literature in the U.S. Readings may include works of fiction, poetry, or drama composed by multiethnic women writers. Attention to a wide range of literary works and historical and cultural contexts.
• GRS EN 688: Critical Studies in African American Literature
  Topic for Fall 2020: Gender and Sexuality in the Neo-slave Narrative. Examines how neo-slave narratives intervene in the sexual and gendered silences of slave narratives and the power relations that produced them. Students who are hesitant to study depictions of sexual violence might consider taking another course.
• GRS EN 690: Critical Studies in Comparative Literature
  Topic for Spring 2019: The Gothic, Identity, & the (Post)Human. Reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century dark narratives together with theory and literary criticism relevant to interpreting the Gothic, particularly regarding identity, conceptions of the human, and aesthetic form. Authors such as Mary Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, Conrad, Barnes, Capote, and Morrison.
• GRS EN 693: Critical Studies in Literature and the Arts
  This course examines translational practices in art, writing, and performance, considering translation between languages, genres, discourses, and media--asking about the political potentials or pitfalls along the way. Includes creative exercises and concludes with the collaborative publication of a zine. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Creativity/Innovation.
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  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Creativity/Innovation
• 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 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 722: Medieval Performance
  Introduction to performance culture in the four centuries before Shakespeare. Reads liturgical and sacramental ritual, guild and court drama, civic and royal pageant, heresy trials, lyric poetry and song, through terms developed by contemporary language and performance theory.

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