Fall 2024
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 his 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 of his writings.
The professional author par excellence who produced a voluminous body of literary works in nearly every genre—short stories, novellas, novels, plays, biographies, travelogues, memoirs, writing notebooks, 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 (by Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Freud, and others) and James film adaptations (by Michael Winner, Campion, Merchant-Ivory, etc.) 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.
EN 500 A1/PH 489/PH 689 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. Effective Fall 2021, 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
Black Thought: Literary and Cultural Criticism in the African Diaspora
An introduction to literary and cultural criticism in African-America and/or the Black Diaspora. The course focuses on historical trends, critical themes, and intellectual characteristics of this work and assesses its relationship to broader political contexts, social movements and cultural transformations. Also offered as CAS AA 591.
EN 537/ AA 591 A1 Chude-Sokei
MWF 2:30 – 3:20p
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.
EN538 A1 Lee and Dobbs
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
The Modern American Novel: Representative Works 1900-1950
Our course will examine representative works by significant American novelists published between 1900 and 1950. Our goal will be to understand how various American writers of this period responded to the extreme changes identified with modernity. How did novelists imagine the social, economic, political, intellectual, and artistic transformations of the first half of the last century? How did authors reimagine expressive styles and narrative methods to engage re-conceptualizations of human behavior; theories of race and culture; definitions of gender; understandings of individual consciousness, perception, and comprehension; the organization of society; the relations of labor, wealth, and consumption; attitudes toward the environment; modern ethics; etc.? We’ll be interested in looking at relations between the artist, the individual work, audience, and historical contexts in order to appreciate how novels represent society and address matters of interest to communities of readers. We’ll also ask how these expectations condition artists’ desires to express their individual sensibilities. We’ll study major developments in the genre of the novel during this time, including the emergence of technically experimental modernist style and form, and innovations in realism. We’ll note some of the effects film had on modern literature. We’ll consider questions about conflicting senses of modern national identity, regional distinctiveness, women’s enfranchisement, race relations and ethnicity, the increasing dominance of urban experience, the crisis of capitalism during the Great Depression, class relations, and the trauma of two world wars.
Taking up W. E. B. Du Bois’s assertion in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” our course this semester will center on works by principal American novelists in the first half of the century who explored questions of race as foundational to U.S. modernity. What does it mean to approach modern American fiction from the standpoint of the nation’s and the West’s long history of racism? In what ways does national modernity rest on a foundation of global racial exploitation? How does the problem of the color line structure the economic, social, and cultural transformations we understand as “the modern,” and how does fiction of the period explore the centrality of racism and devise imaginative responses to it? Authors include James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Research and Information Literacy.
EN546 A1 Matthews
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Joyce & After
Few writers have enjoyed as much acclaim and engendered as much influence as the Irish modernist James Joyce. This course centers Joyce’s writing to map his influence on transatlantic modernism. We will focus on select short stories and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before commencing Joyce’s Homeric epic, Ulysses. Alongside Ulysses, we will read poetry and fiction informed by Joyce’s tour de force. In doing so, this course aims to register Joyce’s influence while also paying due attention to how retellings, revisions, and responses to Joyce lay bare the unique experiences and aesthetic projects of his contemporaries.
Paired with Joyce are selections from authors such as James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and Virginia Woolf. In his work, Joyce famously married the universal and the ordinary, the general and the specific; following this charge, then, we will focus on the universal and enduring aspects of Joyce while insisting upon the singularity of the voices he inspired.
Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Ethical Reasoning, Aesthetic Exploration
CAS EN 548 A1 Hernández
TR 2:00-3:15 (Will be available on the University Schedule shortly. Day/time subject to change)