Fall 2026
Listed below are courses that are upper level undergraduate/graduate level courses in CAS that can be counted towards the MA or PhD in English.
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Our Contemporary: Henry James and the New Media
Of all the major literary figures of the late Victorian-early Modernist era, Henry James has had perhaps the most robust afterlife in the 20th and 21st centuries, influencing the methods of writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Dashiell Hammett, Philip Roth, and James Baldwin; providing standard fictional principles and theory for writing programs (both creative and compositional); his novels adapted by leading film makers, and his life the subject of numerous fictions featuring him as author protagonist (by Colm Toibin, Alan Hollinghurst, Cynthia Ozick, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others). The guiding claim of this course, team-taught by Professor of Philosophy, Juliet Floyd and Professor of English, Susan Mizruchi, is that James’s remarkable longevity, his status as ‘Our Contemporary,’ is a product of his formal, intellectual, and philosophical devotion to innovation, which runs through all his writings.
The professional author par excellence who produced a voluminous body of literary works in nearly every genre—short story, novella, novel, criticism, drama, biography, travelogue, memoir, and letters—there was no writer of his time more committed to his craft and to extending its boundaries, and no writer who experimented more deliberately with what the novel could reveal about the depths of human psychology, gender and sexuality, social life and economy, philosophical meaning and the power of language.
James’s writing developed radically new idioms, “new media” for the presentation of “experience.” His reflections on “perception” deepened and counterbalanced the introspective psychology of his brother William James. His philosophical and psychological meditations expanded the American tradition extending from Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne which viewed “experience” as not mere appearance, but as real, part of Nature itself. “Experience” here is about discovering what really matters. James pressed this self-conscious transcendentalist move toward ordinary reality and its phenomenology forward into the social “media” of his day, inventively demonstrating how criticism of criticism reflects insight into the invention of self, social relations, and experiential capacities.
This course asks how might the “new media” for representing social pressures and relations James developed in his novels, be re-expressed and represented in new media today – including not only social media but dating apps, the representation of courtship in popular ‘reality’ shows, and tv series which have come to replace the function of the novel in providing viewers with opportunities for moral reflection, reconciliation with reality, and discussion of present-day dilemmas.
Through close study of major works by James, alongside popular and influential contemporaneous works this course will draw on his insights to illuminate the social media and popular culture of our time, probing his complex texts to understand social issues connected with romance, economic drives, and pandemic responses that are part of contemporary reality.
Course readings will include: The Portrait of a Lady; The Turn of the Screw; The Bostonians; The Beast in the Jungle; In the Cage. Students will learn how to incorporate James’s inventiveness into their own thinking, building to a capstone project that will involve creating a video, graphic novel, or another form of new media.
Effective Spring 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 500 A1/PH 489/PH 689 A1 Mizruchi and Floyd (Philosophy)
T 3:30 – 6:15p
Reading and Writing Literary Nonfiction
This seminar is for students who want to immerse themselves in the long tradition of literary nonfiction and make their own contributions to it. Ancient and modern masterworks as well as contemporary pieces will give us models to follow and break away from in our own work. Building on the prose skills that we bring to the course and drawing on these models and the feedback of classmates, we will cultivate our own voices as writers. We will also cultivate our skills as creators and innovators, learning how to generate an idea, imagine an audience, develop working strategies, offer and receive criticism, and risk productive failure. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 502 A1 Walsh
R 3:30 – 6:15p
Literature of the Middle Ages 1
How is dying as ‘art’? This course examines the variety and conceptual complexity of the ars moriendi (the art of dying) genre to the imagination of selfhood and social identity in medieval England. Handbooks, poems, images, and plays speak, solemnly or cheerfully, of death, dying, and the dead as vital to individual and communal living: these teach that it is crucial to live each day in the imagination of death and understand the death of every friend, neighbor, and family member as an image of one’s own. Pictured on the walls of public spaces, in the windows of churches, and sculpted on tombs, death was vividly imagined as a constant presence in people’s daily lives. Yet the imagination of death required, as poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Hoccleve knew well, a misrecognition or projection of presence for absence. Death “cannot be explained by any kind of speech” (says theologian Augustine of Hippo) because it has no substance: death is like the present moment in the passage of time which “is sought but is not found, for the transition from future to past occupies no space.” To write about death is thus to engage in a curious linguistic paradox: a poem quickens language while death stills it.
We’ll examine examples of the period’s visual culture of death and dying, including the danse macabre (dance of death) and the momento mori (‘remember to die’); and read works by mystics Marguerite Porete and Julian of Norwich; by poets Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and Eleanor Hull. We’ll end our discussion by exploring the long influence of medieval death aesthetics, including on the works of John Donne and in contemporary ideals of the ‘good death.’
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU HUB areas: Research and Information Literacy, Writing-Intensive.
EN 521 A1 Appleford
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Teaching American Literature
Focused on teaching American literature at the high school level, the course aims to provide students with a broad knowledge base in American literary history, model deeper learning and teaching of selected texts, address theoretical questions in English Language Arts pedagogy, and introduce practical classroom skills. In addition to studying diverse works of American fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography from the perspective of literary criticism, the course will address issues of course design, skill development, curricular planning, and assessment. The class will be team-taught by Prof. Christina Dobbs (Wheelock) and Prof. Maurice Lee (English Dept.). Assignments include short writing exercises, collaborative projects, oral presentations, assessment design, curriculum evaluation, and a literary-critical essay. Also offered as SED EN538. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Teamwork/Collaboration.
EN 538 A1 Lee and Dobbs
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Studies in Auteur Filmmaking
Fall 2026 Topic: David Lynch & Jane Campion: Twin Stars
Twisted dreams, hypnotic imagery, emotional chaos: Jane Campion and David Lynch have each created singular cinematic visions of dark beauty and exquisite strangeness, exploring the uncanny worlds of desire and desperation hidden beneath the surface of everyday life. Both directors entered filmmaking with backgrounds in the visual arts and the avant-garde, and both have traversed multiple genres (film noir, the western, surrealism, melodrama, etc.) and multiple media (film and television), while sustaining utterly unique and deeply personal voices. This seminar will offer a deep dive into the major works of both directors – among them Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks, Sweetie, The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke, In the Cut, Top of the Lake and The Power of the Dog– while paying attention to the way that each director navigates shifting economic, political and institutional dynamics within the film industry to produce films that remain artistically significant and politically vital. Along the way, we will encounter some of the most volatile and transgressive representations of masculinity, femininity, intimacy, power, trauma and spoiled identity that recent cinema has to offer. The seminar is designed for students interested in film analysis, visual culture, and the ways that cinema can make the mysterious, impalpable dimensions of human experience vividly felt. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Aesthetic Exploration, Research and Information Literacy.
EN 564/CI 551 A1 Foltz
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Film and Media Theory
Introduction to film and media theory as a mode of inquiry. What happens when we render the world as an image? How do cinematic images differ from other forms of image-making? What does it mean to be a spectator? Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Research and Information Literacy.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Research and Information Literacy.
EN 569/CI 512 A1 Staff
M 2:30 – 5:15p
Studies in British Literary Movements
Fall 2026 Topic – Radical Imaginings: Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, and the Power of Literature
Margaret Cavendish and John Milton lived through the English Revolution, including almost a decade of civil war, continuing battles over the Protestant Reformation, challenges to ideas of gender and sexuality, the explosion of print culture, the emergence of the New Science, shifts in ideologies and practices of slavery, and the early days of England’s development as an imperial power. Though Cavendish took the side of the monarchy, and Milton the side that executed the King, both took revolutionary positions. They shared an intellectual ambition and rigor that led them to explore ideas to their limit, even when those ideas led them to places they were not yet ready and/or did not want to go. Thus, they offer us profound insight into the ways that imaginative literature and political change dance through history together. Living through the century that saw the development of the writer as an “author,” Cavendish and Milton are some of the first English writers to understand themselves as creatures of print. They thus illuminate how literature takes shape in a moment of media revolution, with significant resonances with the way the digital age has changed our ideas of authorship and audience. In addition to Milton’s epic Paradise Lost and Cavendish’s proto-science fiction The Blazing World, our readings will also include plays, poems, romances, and political tracts. This course offers you the rare opportunity to immerse yourself in the work of two authors—reading big books, thinking deeply, and sharing with your classmates. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
Pre-requisites include two previous literature courses or junior or senior standing; and First-Year Writing (WR 120 or equivalent). The research component of this course will require self-directed work guided by the instructor.
EN 570 A1 Murphy
MWF 12:20 – 1:10p