CAS EN 220: Undergraduate Seminar in Literature Academic Year 2025-2026, Semester II

Fundamentals of literary analysis, interpretation, and research. Intensive study of selected literary texts centered on a particular topic. Attention to different critical approaches. Frequent papers. Limited class size.

Required of concentrators in English.

Satisfies WR 150 requirement.

Fulfills BU Hub requirements: Writing, Research, and Inquiry, Oral and/or Signed Communication, and Research and Information Literacy.

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Topics for Spring 2026

 

Dangerous Hospitality: Guests and Hosts in Literature

The reception and accommodation of the stranger and outsider is a species-specific behavior of homo sapiens which has taken many different forms over the course of human (and literary) history. Our class will examine this phenomena from Homer’s Odyssey to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, pausing along the way to consider other works whose central dynamic revolves around the precarious interactions of guests and hosts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Austen’s Emma, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Joyce’s “The Dead.” Hospitality exists in the liminal space between rejection and absorption, and these texts brilliantly explore the tensions inherent in the (attempted) taming of the xenos, an ancient Greek word which tellingly can be translated as “guest,” “friend,” “stranger” or “foreigner.”

EN 220 A1 Voekel

MWF 10:10 – 11:00a

 

The Rules of Evidence

Because every reader is a detective, this course is devoted to understanding the rules of evidence. Each text that we will address in this seminar in English will take up questions of the construction of meaning, history, and narrative: How do we mobilize information to make arguments? How do we draw “facts” from literary fictions? How does interpretation affect the “reality” of a given set of clues? How do reading practices inform broader cultural phenomena? Primary texts will be drawn from American literature and film, 1840 to the present, and may include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Amy Lowell, Claude McKay, Susan Glaspell, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Monte Hellman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Claudia Rankine. Secondary essays will model a number of different theoretical or investigative approaches and supplement our own inquiries.

EN 220 B1 Howell

TR 11:00a – 12:15p

 

The Boundaries of Being

How do writers create distinctions between lifeless matter and living beings in fictional worlds made out of mere marks on a page? And how can we understand matter to either lose or acquire sentience? How do readers distinguish between the act of shearing of a blushing sheep and of skinning of a dead lamb? What happens when a baby leaps naked and helpless into the “dangerous world”? We will discuss what it means to think of the world as dangerous in 2024 with particular attention the stories people tell and the language writers use to describe the intersecting effects of US settler colonialism, racism, and the climate crisis. Authors include Audre Lorde, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, Franz Kafka, Rebecca Solnit, James Baldwin and Jesmyn Ward.

We explore five interlocking topics: 1) the philosophical and scientific question of how we define being, and where life begins and ends; 2) birth, death, and other transitions between being and non-being; 3) individuation and the individual: where an individual begins and ends: how the boundaries of a self are constructed and broken down; 4) the philosophical history of how human beings have defined themselves in relation to animals, so as to understand what happens when we refuse to acknowledge the existence of another being, and 5) debates on whether we are beholden to one another as beings, and, if so, to what types of beings that mutual care and responsibility extends. This course tracks the contrasts writers set up between sensitive, receptive surfaces and the inanimate world.This course is an intensive writing course that will help you learn to write, edit, and revise a strong college paper in the genre of literary analysis and argument.

EN 220 D1 Henchman

TR 2:00 – 3:15p

 

City Lit

The hum of pedestrians, the clamor of construction, refracted sunlight bending between buildings, the ringing bell of the Green Line cruising down Commonwealth Avenue—these are just a few things you might experience on and around Boston University’s city campus. Often taken for granted, city life as we know it is a relatively new phenomenon in human history and one that fundamentally changed the course of literature. This section of Undergraduate Seminar in Literature reads works interested in the experience of the city, with all its beauty, frustrations, and rich sensory tableau. In this class, we ask: how do writers and artists experience the city, then and now? And how did literature and art help shape new ways of thinking about the city?

Throughout the course, we’ll study the birth of the modern, post-industrial city and the artistic responses that followed, featuring writing from and about Paris, London, Dublin, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Boston. This course likewise engages with multimedia representations of cities to glimpse their visual and sonic landscapes. To that end, we pair our literary readings with considerations of film, artwork, street photography, architecture, urban design, and musical albums. Along the way, we’ll study important concepts like class, industrialism, alienation, the crowd, and the flâneur as ways of better understanding the literary and artistic response to one of the most profound changes to human experience brought on by modernity.

EN 220 E1 Hernández

MWF 11:15a – 12:05p

 

Love and Death

This course introduces the tools of literary and cultural criticism, synthesizing various approaches to interpreting works from different genres (poetry, short story, drama, memoir, novel, film, graphic novel/comics). Our sessions will teach you how to analyze course works by drawing on strategies of close reading, highlighting productive questions to ask about them, and engaging in collective ‘free association’ to illuminate their depths. By learning how to read classic cultural works well, you will become more astute interpreters of all cultural forms, including advertising and new media. We will focus on developing a persuasive narrative voice in your short weekly essays. 

Works Covered: Bechdel, Alison, Fun Home; Clifton, Lucille, “the lost baby poem”; Favorite Student Poems; Kafka, Franz, “A Hunger Artist”; Levi, Primo, Survival in Auschwitz; Morrison, Toni, The Bluest Eye; Scott, Ridley, Thelma and Louise; Smith, Zadie, “Fascinated to Presume”; Strunk and White, The Elements of Style; Shakespeare, William, Sonnet 138; Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire

 

EN 220 G1 Mizruchi

TR 9:30 – 10:45a