English

• CAS EN 604: History of Literary Criticism 1
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - A historical survey of western literary-critical standards from the earliest surviving formulations in classical Athens to the dawn of the twentieth century. Writers include Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Augustine, Dante, Sidney, Hume, Wordsworth, Marx, Nietzsche. 4 cr. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Aesthetic Exploration.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
• CAS EN 606: History of Literary Criticism II
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - Survey of literary critical perspectives and trends in humanistic theory relevant to literary interpretation from the middle of the twentieth century onward, including formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, gender studies, new historicism, and post-colonial studies. Frequent writing assignments of various lengths. Effective Spring 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings.
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  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
• CAS EN 652: Asian American Studies: Theory and Methods
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - A brief overview of the theories and methods of Asian American studies, reading theory, literature, history, culture, sociology, and legal study to define a mode of inquiry and action inspired by a legacy of activism and survival from the Asian diaspora. Effective Fall 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings.
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  • The Individual in Community
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
• CAS EN 665: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - Topic varies by semester. Past topics include Fables and Tales, Appropriation and Performance, etc. Please see English Department's website or contact instructor for current topic.
• CAS EN 666: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - Topic varies by semester. Past topics include Environmental Imaginaries, Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, etc. Please see English Department's website or contact instructor for current topic.
• CAS EN 676: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. - Introduces major movements and texts in gender and sexuality studies central to literary studies. Sub-topics include race, nationhood, family, erotics, the self, public/private spheres, and literary forms. Readings include theoretical works (feminist, queer, transgender, etc.), novels, graphic novels and films.
• CAS EN 677: Critical Studies: Black Diaspora Theory and Practice
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - Explore "diaspora" as a keyword for black studies, intervene in the term's emergence, usage, and many theorizations. Beginning with Paul Gilroy's take on diasporic culture and consciousness, course goes on to complicate/extend/challenge through lens of black gender and sexuality studies. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Aesthetic Exploration, Critical Thinking.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Critical Thinking
  • The Individual in Community
• CAS EN 682: Critical Studies in Modern Literature
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. - Introduction to philosophical and historical approaches to the study of global literature outside Europe and North America. Themes addressed include individual and social development, historical reflection, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, cultural identity, the impact of socio- economic forces Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings and Aesthetic Exploration.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
• CAS EN 686: Studies in Anglophone Literature
  Literature *Topics vary. Topic for Fall 2023: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature. Examines how postcolonial writers have explored the themes of historical upheaval and modernization. We focus on the fictional and non-fictional works of V. S. Naipaul and compare them with Wole Soyinka, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, J. M. Coetzee.
• 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 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 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.