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CAS EN 220: Undergraduate Seminar in Literature
Academic Year 2026-2027, Semester I
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 Fall 2026
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Image/Text: Literature and Visual Media
How do multi-ethnic American writers engage with representation in film, photography, dance, and art? How do authors collaborate with visual artists? This class considers recent literary texts which take up the visual, sonic, and performing arts: novels about Asian American representation on television, poems adapted into videos, comics and graphic novels by Indigenous writers, and short stories and poems written in response to music and dance performances.
Given our focus on cross-media collaborations, this course will introduce students to a wide variety of literary texts, and we will consider the relationship between form, content, and argument. We will read works by authors like James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Thi Bui, Heid Erdrich, LeAnne Howe, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Rebecca Roanhorse, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Charles Yu.
EN 220 A1 Hunziker
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Be Gay Do Crime: Radical Reading and Writing Practices
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? This class is a different rendition of CASEN494/694 “Be Gay Do Crime: Homocidal Villains” that focuses instead on the fundamentals of close-reading, research, and writing. How might one read for queer villainy? How can our close-reading and research interests inform our own writing and reading practices? With a short essay due weekly, this critical-creative course aims – first and foremost – to offer a writing-intensive space for students to practice their critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. 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?
EN 220 B1 James
MWF 12:20 – 1:10p
The 1920s
Call it the “Roaring Twenties,” the “Jazz Age,” or the “Lost Generation”—this class focuses on the artistic, social, and cultural aspects that defined one of the most momentous decades in literary history: the 1920s. We will study the decade through novels, short stories, poetry, and film and pair these explorations with music, art, fashion, and design from the period. Throughout the course, we will also reflect on what the 1920s can teach us about our current decade—from pandemics and financial crises to political turmoil and rapid social change. Over the course of the semester, students will engage with authors who helped define the ’20s, such as T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Katherine Mansfield, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Kafka, Nella Larson, and Virginia Woolf. Along the way, students will sharpen their writing skills; and we will practice writing, editing, and revising the analytical and argumentative college essay.
EN 220 C1 Hernández
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
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 D1 Voekel
TR 11:00a – 12:15p