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 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 754: 1950's America
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - 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.
• 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 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.