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.

• GRS EN 745: Accounting for Literature in 19th-Century America and Britain
  How does 19th-century American literature address the challenge of denying, acknowledging, correcting, and living with being wrong? Contexts include philosophical history, the slavery crisis, and contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship. Readings include Alcott, Douglass, Emerson, Melville, Poe, Stowe, and George Eliot.
• 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 757: Faulkner and Modernist Studies
  How Faulkner's principal fiction imagines modernity. Broad exploration of new directions in modernist studies exemplified in recent scholarship on Faulkner via environmental studies; media ecology; new histories of capitalism; gender and sexuality studies; theory and history of race; global South.
• 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 773: Race and Genre in Interwar American Crime Fiction
  The years from 1920 to 1941 saw radical changes in the popular genres of crime and detective fiction in the US, none more radical than the sudden appearance of detectives of color created by white, non-white, and mixed-race authors alike. This course will focus on three exemplary authors from this period, along with comparative and contrastive examples, in order to explore, in detail, the complex realizations of the interplay of race and genre at this crucial moment in the un- whitening of a traditionally white popular genre.
• GRS EN 775: Theories of Gender and Sexuality
  Topics in Gender and Sexuality. Focus varies semester to semester; see English Department website for current description.
• 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 Wilde, Conrad, Anderson, Eliot, Woolf, Rhys, Barnes, Faulkner, Beckett, Capote, Ellison, Morrison, and Carter in relation to nineteenth-century precursors, contemporary emanations, monsters as myth, humanimality, and conceptual framings from Arendt and Levi- Strauss through Berger and Derrida.
• GRS EN 785: Queer Theory
  Power, Pleasure, Performance -- What is the relationship between power and pleasure, and how might their intersection be performed? This seminar presents an examination of contemporary work in queer theory, performance studies, ethnic studies, and affect theory to think through erotics and minoritization.
• GRS EN 788: Transnational Modernism
  This interdisciplinary course explores how globalization shaped the emergence of modernist styles in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Topics include transatlantic migration; the effects of mobilization and world war; the rise of black internationalism; and modernist indebtedness to Asian cultures.
• GRS EN 789: After Wittgenstein
  Wittgenstein's later work and some of the literary/critical responses it has generated. Topics include meaning, privacy, aesthetics, "the ordinary," pragmatism, avant-garde, narrative selves, animals. Commentaries by Cavell, Rorty, Diamond, Moi, MacIntyre, Perloff; literary works by Nabokov, Stein, Sartre, Beckett, Coetzee.
• GRS EN 792: Introduction to Recent Critical Theory and Method
  Selective survey of recent literary theory and method. Representative topics: Post- Structuralism; Marxism; Frankfurt School; Film Studies; New Historicism; Science and Technology Studies; Performance Theory; Genre; Post-Colonial Studies; Book History; Gender Theory; Disability Studies.
• GRS EN 793: Wordsworth
  Intense study of William Wordsworth's life and writings, focusing on the poetry of the "Great Decade," including Lyrical Ballads and the 1805 Prelude, as well as important works of criticism and theory of the last half century or so.
• GRS EN 794: Professional Seminar
  Developing professional skills and preparing for advanced independent scholarship for English doctoral students in the last semester of coursework. Course includes preparation for comprehensive exam and dissertation prospectus; conference paper submission; publication; fellowship and job applications.
• GRS EN 795: World Literature: Theory and History
  We consider whether postcolonial studies might be expanded to include approaches whose primary aim is not to "subvert" empire. Imperial histories as well as Anglophone fictions and autobiographies by minorities will be studied with this in mind.
• GRS EN 798: Studies in Arts and Literature
  Studies in Arts and Literature: Interdisciplinary consideration of the evolving relationships between the visual, plastic, and literary arts; see English Department website for current topic.
• GRS EN 993: Directed Study in English
  
• GRS EN 994: Directed Study in English
  
• GRS EN 995: Directed Study in Playwriting
  Directed study devoted to writing of the student's thesis play.
• GRS EN 996: Directed Study in Play Production
  Directed study devoted to production of the student's thesis play.

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