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 MyBU Student Portal for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

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  • 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.
    • 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 684: Critical Studies in Literature and Ethnicity
    Topic for Spring 2021: "Identity." This course takes seriously the ongoing dependence on "identity" in cultural tensions, artistic expressions and cultural debates. Where did it come from, what does it mean and why does it matter? Via a cross-cultural exploration of literary, historical and critical works we engage how "identity" is claimed, mobilized and sometimes weaponized.
  • GRS EN 686: Studies in Anglophone Literature
    Literature *Topics vary. Topic for Fall 2023: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature. Examines how postcolonial writers have explored the themes of historical upheaval and modernization. We focus on the fictional and non-fictional works of V. S. Naipaul and compare them with Wole Soyinka, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, J. M. Coetzee.
  • GRS EN 688: Critical Studies in African American Literature
    Topic for Fall 2022: 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.
    • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
    • Aesthetic Exploration
    • Creativity/Innovation
  • GRS EN 695: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
    Topic varies by semester. Past topics include Literature and Affect Theory, Multiethnic Speculative Fiction, Literature and Conceptions of Time, etc. Please see English Department's website or contact instructor for current topic.
  • GRS EN 697: Critical Studies in Literature and Philosophy
    Truth, beauty, reason, emotion, interpretation, justice, meaning--this course reads literature from specific philosophical perspectives, and understands philosophical texts using literary methods. It also examines historical, theoretical, and aesthetic relationships between literature and philosophy. 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, Critical Thinking.
    • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
    • Aesthetic Exploration
    • Critical Thinking
  • 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.
  • 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 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 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: Transatlantic Literature and the History of Print, 1700-1900
    A theoretical and historical examination of transatlantic literature, with a focus on capitalism, aesthetics, and print culture. Readings in Marx, Weber, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson, Paul Gilroy, Defoe, Franklin, Wheatley, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Irving, Bronte, Melville, and James.
  • 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 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.

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