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 696: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 697: Critical Studies in Literature and Philosophy
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Critical Thinking
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
• CAS EN 698: Critical Studies in Contemporary Literature
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: two previous literature courses or junior or senior status. Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - May be repeatable for credit as topics vary. Please see English Department's Website for current topic.
• CAS EN 700: Structure and the Contemporary Script
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. A comparison and analysis of the design of plays from the last two decades, encouraging students to imitate the form, character, and plot from these plays while experimenting with their own narrative structures.
• CAS EN 701: Writing and Research for Graduate Students
  Prerequisite: for English graduate students in their first semester of coursework. Professional skills and knowledge essential for writing, research, and public presentations in graduate school. Topics include the history of the discipline; persuasive arguments and rhetoric in scholarly writing; library, archival, and other research; public speaking in academic contexts.
• CAS EN 705: Seminar: The Writing of Plays 1
  Graduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor, to whom one act or a full-length play must be s ubmitted in the period just before classes begin. - 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.
• CAS EN 706: Seminar: The Writing of Plays 2
  Graduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor, to whom one act or a full-length play must be s ubmitted during the period just before classes begin. - 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.
• CAS EN 720: Dramatic Theory and its Foundations
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. An examination of dramatic theory and an exploration of essential elements of theatre and performance across cultures and eras, with an eye towards contemporary application.
• CAS EN 726: States of Exception: Seventeenth-Century Women's Writing and Violence
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 728: Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. Specialized topics in British medieval literature and culture. Topics vary by instructor: see English department website for details.
• CAS EN 732: Transatlantic Literature and the History of Print, 1700-1900
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 738: Special Topics: Race and Literature
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. Topic varies by semester. Please see English Department's website for current description. This course asks: what can political theory of racial capitalism offer to an analysis of contemporary cultural production? How can literature and media deepen our understanding of the relationship between economic exploitation and the production of race itself?
• CAS EN 743: Narrative and Literary Conceptions of Time
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 747: Topics in British Literature
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. Topic varies by semester. Please see English Department's website for current description.
• CAS EN 749: Environmental Humanities
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - The environmental humanities explore how humans interact with other-than-human beings and forces conceived of as "nature" or "environment" in Western modernity, decentering the human as the central agent of Earthly life at precisely the moment when faced with the Anthropocene.
• CAS EN 766: Milton Now
  Explores Milton's work and the current formation of "Milton studies," focusing on four interrelated topics: modes of reading, historicism, secularism, and gender and sexuality. Asks how and why we read Milton now, engaging conversations about the fate of the humanities.
• CAS EN 767: Topics in American Literature
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. Explores various topics related to American literature and culture, broadly conceived. Topic varies by semester. Please see English Department's website for current description.
• 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 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 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.