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CAS EN 201: Introduction to Literary Studies
Undergraduate Prerequisites: (CASEN 120) or another First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., CASWR 100 or CASWR 120). - Introduction to literary analysis and interpretation. Variable topics. Through frequent writing assignments and discussion, students develop skills in the analysis of literary texts and learn to express their interpretive ideas in correct and persuasive prose. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing-Intensive Course. -
CAS EN 215: Global Modernist Fiction
A comparative study of five modernist authors from different world cultures: Faulkner, Kafka, Chang, Rushdie, and Murakami. Examines experiments in narrative technique as differently situated responses to the major events and legacy of the twentieth century. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Critical Thinking. -
CAS EN 220: Seminar in Literature
Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., EN 120 or WR 100 or WR 120). - Fundamentals of literary analysis, interpretation, and research. Intensive study of selected literary texts centered on a particular topic. Attention to different critical approaches. Frequent papers. Limited class size. Satisfies WR 150 requirement. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing, Research and Inquiry, Research and Information Literacy. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing: Research & Inquiry, Oral and/or Signed Communication, Research and Information Literacy. -
CAS EN 221: Major Authors
Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., CASEN 120 or CASWR 100 or WR 120). - Introduction to the major works of ancient and medieval literatures that influenced later Continental, English, and American literature: the Bible, Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Vergil's Aeneid, and Dante's The Divine Comedy. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing-Intensive Course. -
CAS EN 230: Environmental Humanities and Society
Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., WR 100 or WR 120) - Introduces students to Environmental Humanities as an interdisciplinary field exploring our understandings of diverse social, cultural, and aesthetic relationships to lived environments, environmental change, and environmental justice. Effective Spring 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU HUB areas: Writing-Intensive, Ethical Reasoning, Aesthetic Exploration. -
CAS EN 306: Introduction to Playwriting
Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., WR 100 or WR 120) - This course teaches playwriting craft through lectures, readings, discussion of dramatic writing, writing workshops, attending theatrical events, individual conferences, and the writing of short plays culminating in a one-act. A portfolio of revised work is due at semester's end. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing-Intensive Course, Creativity/Innovation. -
CAS EN 322: British Literature 1
Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., CASEN 120 or WR 100 or WR 120). - Beginnings of English literature from Anglo-Saxon period to end of the seventeenth century. Topics include the development of various poetic forms, medieval romance, and British drama. Authors may include Chaucer, Kempe, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, and Milton. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness. -
CAS EN 323: British Literature 2
Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., CASEN 120 or CASWR 100 or WR 120). - Overview of English literature between 1700 and 1900. Topics include London as urban center, modern prose fiction, Romantic and Victorian poetry, tensions between religion and science. Authors may include Pope, Swift, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, Wilde. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness. -
CAS EN 326: Arts of Gender
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - Examines representations of gender and sexuality in diverse art forms, including drama, dance, film, and literature, and how art reflects historical constructions of gender. Past topics include Gendered Utopias, Gendered Dystopias, the Nature of Gender. Please see English Department's Website for current topic. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, The Individual in Community. -
CAS EN 327: Topics in American Literature
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - Topics vary. Past topics include Fictions of the Modern American South and Modernism, Race, and Resistance. Please see English Department's Website for current topic. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration. -
CAS EN 328: Women's Literary Cultures
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - Writings by women in diverse literary forms, including drama, poetry and prose. How does women's literary culture reflect historical constructions of gender and sexuality' How do writers engage with new literary forms, like the lyric, political treatise, or the novel' Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Aesthetic Exploration. -
CAS EN 329: Film Genres & Movements
An intensive exploration of a particular cinematic genre or movement, paying special attention to how individual films respond to an existing traditions and to the historical and cultural contexts underpinning artistic change. How do genres grow and evolve across historical, cultural and institutional settings? How do particular cinematic movements respond to particular cultural challenges? Course content varies by semester. Topic for Spring 2026: Slapstick. What’s so funny about the human body? How does humor relate to the other emotions? Can making a movie be playful? This class explores these questions by taking as its subject the bombastic and outrageous genre of slapstick comedy. Thinking about slapstick as a physically rigorous performance style that has its beginning in medieval commedia dell’arte, we trace some of its generic features throughout the Vaudeville stage, Classical Hollywood, and early television. Effective Fall 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation. -
CAS EN 333: American Literature: Beginnings to Civil War
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course, or junior or senior standing. - An introduction to the multiple literary traditions of North America (especially that area that would come to be the United States) from the close of the fifteenth century through 1855. Authors include John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness. -
CAS EN 334: American Literature: Civil War to World War 1
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - American literature from the Civil War to the end of World War I in 1918. Changing literary forms in the age of Reconstruction, robber barons, the New Woman, westward expansion. Authors may include Whitman, Alger, Twain, James, Crane, Wharton, Chesnutt. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness. -
CAS EN 341: History of the Novel in English
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - An introduction to the history of the Anglophone novel, from its origins in early modern England to its status as the dominant literary form of modernity. Readings include Defoe, Austen, Dickens, James, Woolf, Morrison, and Coetzee. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking. -
CAS EN 343: Modern Irish Writers
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - Readings in Irish fiction, drama, and poetry, with attention to historical context, aesthetics forms, and values, from 1890 to the present, by such writers as Wilde, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Joyce, Bowen, Beckett, Heaney, Boland, Muldoon, and Carr. Effective Spring 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Ethical Reasoning. -
CAS EN 345: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - The development of the American novel in 19th C America: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Moby- Dick, plus Twain, Jacobs, Southworth, Chesnutt. Formal/aesthetic questions will be linked to cultural/historical ones including race and slavery, gender, individualism, and representing America. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness. -
CAS EN 347: Topics in Contemporary Global Fiction
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - May be repeated for credit as topic varies. Introduction to contemporary fiction by authors outside Europe and North America. Themes addressed include migration, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, decolonization, citizenship, ethnic conflict, and changing notions of cultural identity. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy. -
CAS EN 348: Topics in Modern Literature
Undergraduate prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior/senior status. - An introduction to modernist literature & culture, detailing the transformations of poetry and fiction amid the early twentieth century's widespread social and technological upheavals. Possible writers include Conrad, Proust, Stein, Eliot, Joyce, Toomer, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Barnes, Beckett, and more. May be repeated for credit as topic varies. Please see English Department’s website for current topic. -
CAS EN 349: Contemporary American Fiction
Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing. - US prose fiction from the last few decades, exploring questions of individualism, community, identity, technology, media, religious belief, violence, post-WWII political changes, and our relation to history. Authors may include Roth, Robinson, DeLillo, Pynchon, Morrison, and Lahiri, among others. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, The Individual in Community.
