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 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing. Topics vary. Past topics include Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature, Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. Please see English Department’s website for current topic.
• 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 varies by semester. Past topics include Gender and Sexuality in the Neo-slave Narrative, Black Women in Life and Writing, etc. Please see the English Department’s website for the current topic.
• CAS EN 695: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Graduate Prerequisites: graduate standing. Topic varies by semester. Past topics include Fables and Tales, etc. Please see the English Department's website for the 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 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 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.