Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular term. 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.

• CAS EN 771: The Novel in Theory and History
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 773: Race and Genre in Interwar American Crime Fiction
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate Standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 775: Theories of Gender and Sexuality
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - Topic varies by semester; see English Department's website for current description. This course explores the recent history of literary critical approaches to gender and sexuality, organized around a special topic. Readings include classic and recent theoretical works, and literary texts from a range of historical periods.
• CAS EN 777: American Popular Writing
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 779: Modernism: Text and Screen
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 782: Faulkner in Context
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - Faulkner’s fiction in dialogue with later novelists who challenge his vision: Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Edward P. Jones, Jesmyn Ward. Topics include the plantation, racial capitalism, formation of identity and community, gender and sexuality, desecration of the environment, aesthetic choices.
• CAS EN 788: Transnational Modernism
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 789: After Wittgenstein
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 792: Introduction to Recent Critical Theory and Method
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 794: Professional Seminar
  Graduate Prerequisites: English PhD students in their final semester of coursework. - 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.
• CAS EN 795: World Literature: Theory and History
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 798: Studies in Arts and Literature
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 799: Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture
  Explores texts, contexts, and theories that have shaped contemporary literary cultures. Interconnections between modern and contemporary literatures alongside theoretical paradigms such as critical studies of gender, race, sexualities, and class, global and comparative approaches to challenges, aesthetic experimentation, and more.
• CAS EN 993: Directed Study in English
  DS ENGLISH 1
• CAS EN 994: Directed Study in English
  DS ENGLISH 2
• CAS EN 996: Directed Study in Play Production
  Graduate Prerequisites: thesis-level student in the MFA in Playwriting. - Directed study devoted to production of the student's thesis play.
• CAS HI 500: Topics in History
  May be repeated for credit as topics vary. Topic for Fall 2024: Before the Deluge: Weimar Germany, 1918-1933. Explores Weimar’s fragility and resilience. Explores problems of political polarization, from authoritarian thought to insurrectionary violence; economic instability, from hyperinflation to Depression; social integration, from reproductive and gay rights to homicidal racism; and cultural production, from philosophy to film. Topic for Spring 2025, Section A1: Love and Lust in the French Empire. Explores the history of intimacy across the nineteenth and twentieth century French Empire. We discuss how patriarchy, racism, and class underpinned colonial norms and anxieties. Topics include sexuality, marriage, and childbearing in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Topic for Spring 2025, Section B1: Black Erotics and Ecstasy: Feminist and Queer Studies. Attends to notions of the erotic and ecstasy in black feminist and queer historiography by considering racialized sexualities, desires, and longings in relation to the persistence of injury and violence that frame the history of slavery and its afterlives.
• CAS HI 504: The Civil War in American Memory
  From the immediate post-war years through very recent political conflicts, Americans have vigorously contested the memory of their Civil War. This course considers this question by exploring literature, film, and historical documents. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
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  • Historical Consciousness
  • Research and Information Literacy
• CAS HI 505: The American South in History, Literature, and Film
  Explores the American South through literature, film, and other sources. Considers what, if anything, has been distinctive about the Southern experience and how a variety of Americans have imagined the region over time. This course cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course with the same title that was previously numbered CAS HI 462. Also offered as CAS AM 505. Effective Spring 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Historical Consciousness
• CAS HI 506: The Transformation of Early New England: Witches, Whalers and Warfare
  Explores how religious schisms and revival, warfare with native Americans, political revolution, and commercial development transformed New England from a Puritanical agricultural society into an urbanized, industrial society by the outbreak of the American Civil War. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Social Inquiry I.
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  • Historical Consciousness
  • Social Inquiry I