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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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
W 2:30 – 5:15p
Marxist Cultural Criticism
This course is an introduction to Marxist cultural criticism that examines the transformation of concepts from classic Marxism (Marx, Lukacs, Althusser, Adorno, and Gramsci) into contemporary debates about race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, modernity, and language (Said, Jameson, and Spivak, and others).
Specifically, this course asks: What is a “materialist” interpretation of culture? Are the “material” and the “cultural” mutually exclusive? What are some useful models for the interpretations of culture developed by Marxist and non-Marxist authors, and how do we historicize their differences? How does “culture,” understood as the non-economic sphere of society, relate to “cultures” in the anthropological sense—to the geopolitical spaces in the world? How do Marxist concepts such as reification, alienation, commodity fetishism, symptomatic reading, formal vs. real subsumption, hegemony, and surplus value provide useful tools for thinking about race, gender, and language? In other words, what does Marxism—presumed to be the analysis of economic relations—have to say about culture? Our exploration of the foundational texts in “cultural materialism” will provide useful answers to these questions. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Critical Thinking.
EN 539/XL 530 A1 Liu
T 3:30 – 6:15p
Feminist Killjoys & Cynical Queers: Intersectional Theories of Affect
In this course, we will meet feminist killjoys, grapple with queer negativity, engage with Afro-pessimism, and encounter crip feelings. We will survey intersectional theories of affect and emotion with particular focus on cultural constructions of happiness, depression, joy, shame, anger, optimism, disgust, fear, and grief.
Through our readings and discussions, we will work together to develop a critical framework to address vital questions such as: how do hierarchies of sensation impact notions of ability, whose emotions are socially regulated, how do affects circulate in the media, and why do certain affects become associated with particular marginalized subject positions? We will also consider how affect and emotionality play key roles in strengthening social bonds, creating collective identities, and motivating action.
This class is designed to provide an upper-level examination of the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences, which has been marked by a shift in attention towards bodily sensation, structures of feeling, and modes of relationality. Readings will include work by theorists like Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetovich, Anna Gibbs, Audre Lorde, Brian Massumi, José Esteban Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Silvan Tomkins. Assignments include discussion posts, a profile of an affect, a display, and a culminating essay. This course fulfills a single requirement in each of the following BU HUB areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Research and Information Literacy, Writing Intensive.
EN 558/WS 559 A1 Cariani
W 2:30 – 5:15p
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 Desilets
M 2:30 – 5:15p
Studies in British Literary Movements
Spring 2026 Topic – Slices of Life: Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the British Multiplot Novel
This course plunges students into two giants of British literature: Charles Dickens’s 1853 Bleak House and George Eliot’s 1872 Middlemarch. Starting with Dickens’s great multiplot novel Bleak House, we will analyze Dickens’s satirical humor, exuberant style and characterization of such memorable figures as Inspector Bucket and Krook, who dies of spontaneous combustion midway through the novel. Bleak House contains grisly murders, secret love affairs and fallen women. It’s a classic example of a novel of the city in which interation is characterized by a glimpse, a glance. The city contains apparently distinct social realms whose boundaries are vigilantly policed. Only rarely, we assume, can such social boundaries be crossed. And yet as we follow the stories of 50-60 characters whose lives seem impossibly separate, Dickens presents us with scene after scene in which new intimacies occur between characters we have come to know well but who have not yet encountered one another.
George Eliot’s 1872 Middlemarch is arguably the greatest British novel. It’s a meticulously plotted realist novel with interweaving stories involving inheritance, debt, blackmail, unhappy marriages, and scientific vocation. With it, Eliot provides a wide swath of the world of 19th-century Britain—a slice of life in all its complexity. Even more than Bleak House, Middlemarch is itself designed to be a masterpiece. Eliot called it a “home epic,” placing it on the level of Homer, Virgil and Milton, while focusing on domestic realism as a radical rethinking of who and what should be the subject of fiction: the messy facts of everyday life.
For Eliot, realism is a democratic mode that endows the everyday with seriousness and significance. The novel takes place in the 1830s, a transitional time before the Great Reform Bill, when power is shifting away from landowning nobility to the new merchant and manufacturing classes. Middlemarch involves a series of episodes in which two characters become bound to each other – through marriage, inheritance, secrets, family relationships – or choose not to be bound to each other. Eliot famously applies Charles Darwin’s ideas to human behavior, emphasizing the roles of chance and larger systemic forces, and challenging the idea of individuals as bounded, self-contained units. This is a world of many centers, characterized by interconnectedness.
One of the most important formal features of both novels is how they constantly shift their points of view from character to character, showing the world from different levels of society and with a different set of concerns. But almost everyone in Middlemarch gets to be central at some point in the story. In addition to its social analysis, the novel is known for its depiction of the drama of interior life: perceptions, memories, sensation and suffering. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
EN 570 A1 Henchman
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Studies in Modern Literature: Irony and the Novel
The German novelist Thomas Mann once called irony “the really fruitful, the productive, and hence the artistic principle”: it “glances at both sides,” “plays slyly and irresponsibly … among opposites,” and is “in no great haste to take sides and come to decisions.” In saying this, Mann was following a long tradition that associates irony with the modern novel—a form that juxtaposes different voices, styles, images, and attitudes in ways that make it difficult to pin down the beliefs and ethical commitments of the author. This course will examine a number of major post-WWII English-language novels that explore the novel’s dizzying movements between belief and irony, “taking sides” and “playing irresponsibly.” Novels may include Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Morrison’s Sula (1973), Ozick’s The Shawl (1983), Erdrich’s Tracks (1988), Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Cusk’s Outline (2014). Non-fiction by Mikhail Bakhtin, Zadie Smith, Richard Rorty, Jonathan Lear, and others will allow us to reflect on irony, dialogue, and genre. Through writing exercises, class presentations, and library visits, students will develop their skills as researchers and as critical writers, and they will cap off their semester with a long research paper.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing Intensive Course, Research and Information Literacy
EN 582 B1 Chodat
MWF 11:15a – 12:05p
Studies in African-American Literature
Spring 2026 topic: Black Feminist Theory
This course explores the dynamic nature of Black feminist theory. In doing so, we will trouble the creative-critical divide by examining how objects of expression—novels, poems, visual art—function as sites of Black feminist theorizing in tandem with what is traditionally recognized as theory. By analyzing the diverse methodological approaches of the assigned texts, we will grapple with the myriad ways Black feminist knowledge is produced.
EN 588/AA 502 A1 Desir
TR 3:30 – 4:45p