English

• 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
  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.
• CAS EN 747: Topics in British Literature
  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
  Explores various topics related to American literature and culture, broadly conceived.
• 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.