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 688: Critical Studies in African American Literature
  Undergrad prerequisites: two previous literature courses or junior or senior standing. Graduate prerequisites: graduate standing. - Topic for Fall 2024; 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.
• CAS EN 695: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - 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.
• 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 700: Structure and the Contemporary Script
  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 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 716: Sonnet
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - This seminar foregrounds authors engaged on the wide-ranging experimentation that shaped the development of the sonnet as a verse-form in English between roughly the 1530s and the 1630s.
• CAS EN 720: Dramatic Theory and its Foundations
  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 722: Medieval Performance
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - 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.
• 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
  Specialized topics in British medieval literature and culture. Topics vary by instructor: see English department website for details.
• CAS EN 731: Global Romanticism
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• 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 734: Social Difference and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism in American Literature
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - Against the backdrop of recent scholarship, the course examines how Cahan, Howells, James, Wharton, Dreiser, and Dunbar indexed materialism, philanthropy, literary marketplace, and cultural capital in terms of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and political ideology.
• 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 740: Science, Technology, Media: Race and Contemporary Criticism
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 742: Knowing, Feeling, and Judging
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - What is the status of aesthetic and interpretive claims' Are they rational, cognitive, or calculative' Are they expressions of preference, emotion, ideology, wisdom' Readings in aesthetics from Kant onwards, including Cavell, Fried, Gadamer, Sontag, Jameson, affect theory, Digital Humanities.
• 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 744: Nineteenth-Century British Novels
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• CAS EN 745: Accounting for Literature in 19th-Century America and Britain
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.