Upper-level Undergraduate Courses in Language and Literature
Academic Year 2025-2026, Semester II
All courses carry 4 credits, unless otherwise indicated.
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Advanced Undergraduate Courses
Spring 2026 Courses that Fulfill English Major Requirements:
Please note that a class may not be used to fulfill more than one distribution requirement.
Courses meeting requirements for students declaring an English major in FA 22 and after:
- EN 101: Encounters: Reading Across Time and Space
- EN 220: Seminar in Literature
- Critical Methods: EN 406, EN 486, EN 494, EN 498,
- Power, Identity, and Difference: EN327, EN 347, EN349, EN351, EN 486, EN 494, EN 498, EN 558, EN 588
- British or American Literature before 1700: EN 322, EN 363
- British or American Literature, 1700-1900: EN 323, EN 333, EN 570
Courses meeting requirements for students who have declared an English major prior to FA 22:
- EN 220: Seminar in Literature
- EN 221: Major Authors
- EN 322: British Literature I
- EN 323: British Literature II
- Pre-1800 British or American Literature: EN333, EN 363
- Pre-1900 American Literature: EN 333
- Critical Methods: EN 406, EN 486, EN 494, EN 498,
- Diverse Literatures in English: EN327, EN 347, EN349, EN351, EN 486, EN 494, EN 498, EN 558, EN 588
*Please note again that the same course cannot be used fulfill two separate requirements. I.e.: students may choose to count EN 486 either as a “Critical Methods” course or as a “Power, Identity, and Difference” course, but they may not have EN 486 count as both.
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Major Authors I
Introduction to the major works of ancient and medieval literatures that influenced later Continental, English, and American literature: the Bible, Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Required of concentrators in English who declared an English Major prior to Fall 2022. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing-intensive Course.
EN 221 A1 Voekel
MWF 12:20 – 1:10p
British Literature 1
Beginnings of English literature from Anglo-Saxon period to end of the seventeenth century. Topics include the development of various poetic forms, medieval romance, and British drama. Authors may include Chaucer, Kempe, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Marlowe, Donne, Cavendish, and Milton. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
EN 322 A1 Burnett
MWF 10:10 – 11:00a
British Literature II
British literature from the Restoration in 1660 to the end of the nineteenth century. Authors may include Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Alfred Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde. Major topics include London as a developing urban center, the emergence of modern prose fiction, the growing emphasis on “sensibility,” the rise of Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution, tensions between religion and science, and fin de siècle aestheticism. Prerequisite: EN 322. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area(s): Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
EN 323 A1 Burnett
MWF 12:20 – 1:10p
Topics in American Literature
Spring 2026 topic: Major 20th-Century Author: James Baldwin
Having lived from 1924 to 1987, James Baldwin witnessed some of the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. He was born in Harlem to parents who struggled to make ends meet and often turned to religion to cope. Though ultimately less reliant on traditional religion, Baldwin became a “boy preacher” at age 14—a decision that left its mark on his life and work as he consistently analyzed gender and sexuality. By 1949, when he was 24, he was publishing essays that commanded considerable attention, and he published his first novel in 1953, before he was 30. He left the United States in 1948 and lived in Paris for many years, and he eventually felt more at home in Istanbul, Turkey, and the South of France than in the country of his birth. Still, in his later years, he spent some time in Ohio as a lecturer at Bowling Green State University and in Amherst at the University of Massachusetts. Baldwin wrote essays, novels, plays, and poetry, and he participated in important movements, interacting with everyone from Marlon Brando and Lorraine Hansberry to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad.
This class will use this extraordinary man’s work to understand the United States during the decades in which he lived and worked. We will operate as an intellectual community, with everyone engaging the same material together as well as (responsibly and rigorously) sharing with each other resources that not everyone has consulted directly. As a collective, we will read some of Baldwin’s most significant works, understanding that he was so prolific that we simply cannot cover his oeuvre in a semester. We will engage his non-fiction prose, with readings from essay collections such as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time; we will read his earliest novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962); and we will engage his work as a playwright via Blues for Mister Charlie (1964).
Requirements: careful, consistent reading; thoughtful class participation; a short paper or two; a longer project. Also, students should register for this course only if they are willing to hone their oral presentation skills. Public speaking is a top fear among Americans; college-educated people need practice.
This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration.
EN 327 A1 Mitchell
TR 5:00-6:15p
Film Genres and Movements
Spring 2026 topic: Slapstick Comedy
What’s so funny about the human body? How does humor relate to the other emotions? Can making a movie be playful? This class will explore these questions by taking as its subject the bombastic and outrageous genre of slapstick comedy. Thinking about slapstick as a physically rigorous performance style that has its beginning in medieval commedia dell’arte, we’ll trace some of its generic features throughout the Vaudeville stage, Classical Hollywood, and early television. In addition to analyzing the generic signatures and themes of slapstick comedy—like violence, desire, absurdity, naivete, and everyday life—we’ll also learn to identify how these themes come across in filmmaking practices, using stunt work, choreography, Foley effects, and illusions through practical effects and editing. To deepen our understanding on comedy, performance, and cinema, we will examine different critical frameworks for attending to slapstick: psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, philosophy with Henri Bergson and Stanley Cavell, as well as cultural discourses around race, class, and gender. We’ll see that slapstick will also help us think differently about the formal structures of film, specifically scenario, plot, and narrative pacing. We will also consider the legacy and influence of slapstick comedy in animation, stand-up comedy, and kung-fu movies. As we think critically about the aesthetic, cultural, and historical context for slapstick comedy, we will also have the opportunity to create our own short films that explore aspects of comedy’s use of practical effects. Films and T.V. may include the work of Alice Guy-Blanché, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Bert Williams, the Marx Brothers, Lucille Ball, Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Jackie Chan, David Lynch, and Tyler Perry. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Digital/Multimedia Expression, and Creativity/Innovation.
EN 329/CI 330 A1 Saunders
W 2:30 – 5:15p
American Literature: Beginnings to 1860
An introduction to the multiple literary traditions of North America (especially that area that would come to be the United States) from the close of the fifteenth century through 1855. Authors include John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Susanna Rowson, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
EN 333 A1 Howell
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Topics in Contemporary Fiction: Imagining Decolonization
This course examines how international authors depicted the historical transition from a world of colonial empires to a world of nation-states. Authors discussed may include Andric, Abrahams, Salih, Naipaul, Dangarembga, Adichie. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy.
EN 347 A1 Krishnan
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Global Asian Literature
This course explores 20th-and 21st-century ethnic Asian writers whose literary works help us question the paradigm of national literature and appreciate the power of border-crossing literature. Main topics include colonialism, racism, post-colonial politics, migration, World War II, and wars in post-1945 Asia. Effective Fall 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU HUB areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing-Intensive Course.
EN 351/XL 377 A1 Yang
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
Shakespeare 1
Six plays chosen from the following: Richard II, Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale. Some attention to the sonnets. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration and Historical Consciousness.
EN 363 A1 Appleford
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Studies in Non-Cinematic Media
Spring 2026 topic: Marvel Cinematic Universe
This course explores the economic, political, and aesthetic implications of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe.” How does the MCU’s interlocking multimedia meganarrative give the impression of a “universe,” and how does that universe interact with the one we live in? Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 365/CI 367 A1 Desilets
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
Haruki Murakami and His Sources
Students read works by Haruki Murakami and by writers who shaped him or were shaped by him, reflect on the nature of intertextuality, and gain a perspective on contemporary literature as operating within a global system of mutual influence. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 369/LJ 460/LJ 660 A1 Zielinska-Elliott
MWF 11:15a – 12:05p
Detective Fiction
Crime fiction is one of the most popular literary genres, but it has long been relegated to “lowly” pulp status. This course takes the genre seriously, introducing students to some of the most influential works of mystery, crime, and detective fiction. Through our readings, we consider how writers have addressed enduring questions about crime, politics, law, violence, and justice while interrogating the detective story’s relationship to “high” literary and cinematic forms. We begin with foundational detective stories that brought us Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes before traveling to the golden age of pulp, whodunnit, and noir storytelling from authors like Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Graham Greene. We conclude by studying global and postcolonial detective fiction that remixed and carried the genre into the contemporary, including works from Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Seicho Matsumoto. The literary critic Cedric Watts once wrote, “if intelligence is the art of seeing or creating connections between apparently unconnected things, then literary texts manifest and teach this art, for they solicit and reward their searchers.” We will therefore play detective ourselves, aiming to understand and solve the riddles of the texts at hand, and consider literary analysis as itself a detective process.
EN 373 studies theoretical topics alongside literary readings and will be relevant to students interested in the following areas: politics, state authority, and legal theory; empire and colonialism; genre studies, narrative theory, and literary theory; film and television; gender and sexuality studies; and epistemology, existentialism, and moral philosophy. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking.
EN 373 A1 Hernández
MWF 9:05 – 9:55a
History of Criticism II
Survey of perspectives and trends in critical theory relevant to literary interpretation from the middle of the twentieth century onward, including structuralism, post-structuralism, gender and race studies, cultural theory, post-colonial studies, environmental criticism. Frequent writing assignments of various lengths. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area(s): Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings.
EN 406 A1 Walsh
MWF 10:10 – 11:00a
Studies in Anglophone Literature: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature
Examines how Anglophone writers have explored themes of historical upheaval and psychological transformation in the colonial world. We read criticism by Lukacs, Auerbach, Williams, and Said. Fiction by Rhys, Coetzee, Adichie, and others.
EN 486 A1 Krishnan
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Critical Studies in Literature and The Arts
Spring 2026 Topic – Be Gay Do Crime: Homo(cidal) Villains
Sure, everything could be read as straight or platonic, but where’s the fun in that? Though the origin of the popular “Be Gay Do Crime” meme can only be traced back to 2016, there is a long-entangled history of queerness, criminality, and horror. Within the last ten years, conversations around representation in media have begun to touch on issues like queerbaiting and the “bury your gays” trope, but how far back does the cultural obsession with queer-coded villains extend? Using contemporary and canonical queer theory, this class aims to read these works through a new lens. Beginning with texts like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and moving onwards and outwards to 1994 film Interview with the Vampire, and BBC’s Killing Eve (2018), this course will lean into the study of often villainous and antagonistic representations of queerness. This interdisciplinary, discussion-based seminar strives to answer the question: What remains at stake when queer tenderness is cloaked in tragedy and violence? How does race, gender, and sexuality further complicate the transgressive threats of queer tenderness? This seminar will focus on characters like HIM from the Powerpuff Girls (1998), and with care, deliberately center the positioning and reading of the queer villainous subject. Students especially interested in queer “Poor Little Meow Meow” characters, supervillains, fan work, marginalization, “toxic” or “problematic” representation, and queer coding in literature and film should take this class. This course is designed to familiarize students with research methods and current scholarship in the field of literary studies.
EN 494 A1 James
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Critical Studies in Contemporary Literature
Topic for Spring 2026: Border Studies / Critical Forced Displacement Studies
The US southern border played a tremendous role in the 2024 presidential election for both parties, and immigration and deportation are likely to continue to be central political concerns, even as US resettlement of refugees has halted entirely. What makes borders and human mobility across them so important to political imaginaries, cultural constructions, and identity performances? This course will use the US southern border as a starting point to explore bordering practices around the world and the field border studies, which has emerged since the 1980’s as an interdisciplinary framework that examines how cultural practices create borders as spaces that: negotiate between national/cultural belonging and exclusion; question state sovereignty, security, and exceptionalism; and inspire creative contemporary literary and activist projects. Alongside theoretical texts, we will read literature by and about displaced communities and track discourses on borders and displacement in contemporary media. Authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Vincent Delacroix, Josefina López, Valerie Luiselli, Kara Hartzler, and Luis Alfaro.
EN 498 A1 Preston
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
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