Fall 2023 Introductory Courses

Introductory Undergraduate Courses in Language and Literature

Academic Year 2023-2024, Semester I
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All courses carry 4 credits, unless otherwise indicated.

Effective Fall 2020, one course numbered CAS EN 121 – 201 and 203 – 215 may count toward the seven additional courses, provided it was taken before or concurrently with EN 220.

If you are considering a major or minor in English, you should take EN 220 rather than WR 150, 151, or 152.

Please note that a class may not be used to fulfill more than one distribution requirement.

All of the courses listed below fulfill the Humanities divisional credit in CAS.

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Encounters: Reading across Time and Space

This new, team-taught course provides an introduction to English literature across the ages. We will stage encounters across time and space between authors working in the English language – from the middle ages to the present, and from England to the Americas and around the globe.

Highlighting canonical and non-canonical texts, we will discuss representative moments in the history of genre, including poetry, drama, travel narrative, autobiography, the novel, film, and performance. Alongside our early works, we will read and view the work of artists and activists from various backgrounds who have responded creatively to texts from literary history, in gestures of homage, repudiation, or ambivalence. These conversations might be direct and explicit or more indirect and allusive. We will also pay special attention to how a later work might influence our understanding of an earlier work. Along with more formal thesis-driven assignments, students will have their own opportunity to speak back to our readings; like the artists and activists on our syllabus, students will be invited to draw on their specific histories and experiences to craft creative encounters with the early works we read. Effective Fall 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU HUB areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation, Teamwork/Collaboration.

EN101 A1 Appleford and Rezek

TR 09:30 – 10:45a

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Freshman Seminar

Limited enrollment. Variable topics. Through discussions and frequent writing assignments, students develop skills in the close reading of literary texts and learn to express their interpretive ideas in correct and persuasive prose. Satisfies CAS WR 120 requirement. The Freshman Seminar fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: First-Year Writing Seminar.

EN 120 A1 Staff

MWF 11:15a – 12:05p

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EN 120 B1 Staff

MWF 12:20 – 1:10p

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EN 120 C1 Staff

MWF 9:05 – 9:55a

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EN 120 D1 Staff

MWF 10:10 – 11:00a

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INTRODUCTORY COURSES

Reading World Literature

Study of literature in English or English translation — poetry, drama, and prose narrative — outside of British and American traditions. Attention to such topics as cultural self-construction, relationships of historical context to artistic expression, and development of literary forms. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Research and Information Literacy.

EN121 A1 Staff

MWF 10:10 – 11:00a

Medieval Worlds: Through the Body

“Why all the fuss about the body?” asks medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum. What did it mean to have a body in the Middle Ages? While many modern minds consider the body as a sealed and closed entity – something that contains our organs and emotions – medieval bodies were porous, open, fluid, and textual. The boundaries of the body could stretch back in time, inhabit multiple places, be alive but not quite, and move between earthly corporeality and divinity. These variations of embodiment make the medieval period a particularly crucial moment to explore how bodies are socially, politically, and medically constructed and controlled. In this introduction to medieval literature, we will look to medieval bodies as our point of entry. Drawing on recent work in medieval studies on the body, we will examine how legal, medical, scientific, and religious texts approach the body. We will consider how a Christological vision of a body politic fused itself into medieval political theory and religious persecution. While Christ’s own porous body offered a model for the layperson to emulate, it also was used to divide the social body into parts. Together we will question the differences in how bodies are presented in scientific literature versus bodies in, say, a Vita (a saint’s “life”)? Where did medieval thinkers draw boundaries between celestial, divine, human, animal, and non-vital bodies (if at all)?

Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Teamwork/Collaboration.

EN 122 A1 Goodrich

TR 3:30 – 4:45p

Introduction to African American Literature

What is the African American literary tradition? How does it change over time? This course is to introduce you to the cultural, political, and historical contexts of the African American experience through readings of literature. We will read poetry, slave narratives, essays and speeches, tales, short stories, and novels, and as we examine these texts, we will consider how culture, politics, and history shape African American literature. Effective Fall 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking. Prerequisites: First-Year Writing Seminar (WR100/120 or equivalent)

EN129 A1 Boelcskevy

TR 11:00a – 12:15p

Science/Fiction

Through readings in British and/or American literature, an exploration of some of the following topics: science and technology as literary themes; historical construction of science and art; similarities and differences between literary and scientific methods; the development of science fiction. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Ethical Reasoning, Writing-Intensive Course. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Ethical Reasoning.

EN130 A1 Staff

MWF 9:05 – 9:55a

Write Back Soon: Blackness and the Prison

This course interrogates the theme of black containment from slavery and Jim Crow to, principally, mass incarceration. The topic is explored in tandem with the development of open letter writing skills. This epistolary form allows both for the intimate engagement of individual, familiar contact and the deft inclusion of targeted eavesdroppers in order to raise the consciousness of listeners and affirm the value of personal relationships. Course texts include letters to and from prison, poetry, short stories, memoir, social science, documentaries, and critical theory. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Aesthetic Exploration, Critical Thinking.

EN132 A1 Owen

TR 2:00 – 3:15p

Reading Shakespeare 1

Beginning with his grizzly first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and ending with the magically enigmatic The Winter’s Tale, we will explore the arc of Shakespeare’s career, reading seven of his plays in the social, political and theatrical contexts of his time.  Since Shakespeare’s work cannot be limited to any one moment or place, however, we will also consider how his plays travel across time, space and media by examining the lively performance history and radical appropriations of his texts.  Drawing on Boston’s rich theatre culture, we will attend at least one live performance together.  For each of the plays we read on the page, we will consider different film adaptations, analyzing how a range of actors, directors and screenwriters have remade Shakespeare in different moments.  Finally, we will consider how Shakespeare lives on hundreds of years after his birth through different social media as we examine the afterlife of his works in the digital age.  Including tragedies (Titus and Hamlet), histories (Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1), comedies (Much Ado About Nothing and All’s Well That Ends Well) and a romance (A Winter’s Tale), this class explores some of literature’s most vicious villains, most intriguing plots, most passionate love affairs and most sharp-witted banter. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking.

EN163 A1 Staff

MWF 10:10 – 11:00a

The Graphic Novel

Examination of the rise, nature, and status of the contemporary book-length graphic novel. Topics may include graphic vs. traditional novel, word and image, style and space, representations of subjectivity, trauma, and history. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Digital/Multimedia Expression, Creativity/Innovation.

EN170 A1 Staff

TR 11:00a – 12:15p

Introduction to Film & Media Aesthetics

This course will provide an overview of fundamental critical concepts for the analysis and understanding of aesthetic form in film, television and digital media. We will cover key concepts of formal composition (e.g. editing, mise-en-scène, cinematography, narrative structure, televisual flow, beat structure, digital compositing, sound perspective, and more) over a diverse set of media texts. Students will learn foundational skills in the analysis appropriate to film, television and other moving-image media. How do these media create meanings through their form? How are problems of perspective, character, desire, and memory represented in audio-visual terms? How have these aesthetic strategies shifted with developments in technology? Works by Ingmar Bergman, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Kelly Reichardt, Alfred Hitchcock, Alex Garland, Buster Keaton, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Bresson, David Lynch and others. Weekly screenings. Effective Fall 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Aesthetic Exploration, Critical Thinking.

EN176 A1/B1 Foltz

TR 2:00 – 3:15p Lecture/Discussion

M 6:30 – 9:15p Film Screenings

Introduction to Latinx Literature

Survey of U.S. Latinx literature that introduces students to the major trends in the tradition. Course emphasizes the historical and aesthetic networks established in the Latinx literary canon that continue into the present, while also exploring the relationship between genre and socio-historical issues. We begin with readings from contemporary scholars who attempt to define what Latinx is and can be, establishing a foundation for thinking about the shifting definitions of “Latinx” in the U.S. Effective Fall 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Aesthetic Exploration, Teamwork/Collaboration.

EN178 A1 Gil’Adí

MWF 1:25 – 2:15p

Introduction to Literary Studies

Introduction to literary analysis and interpretation. Variable topics. Through frequent writing assignments and discussion, students develop skills in the analysis of literary texts and learn to express their interpretive ideas in correct and persuasive prose. Effective

Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing-Intensive Course.

EN201 A1 Bjornson

MWF 1:25 – 2:15p

Global Modernist Fiction

While “literary modernism” commonly refers to the artistic and cultural changes in Western society during late-19th and early 20th centuries, non-Western authors throughout the twentieth century have responded to these changes and developed narrative experiments of their own to expand the list of motifs and techniques that we recognize as “modern” and, in turn, complicate the story of literary modernism. This course is a comparative study of five modernist authors: William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Eileen Chang, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami. We will ask, how do writers from different cultures develop nonrepresentational or “modernist” narrative techniques in order to capture the experience of modernity? And what happens when modernity itself is understood as a contested and multifaceted phenomenon, such as colonial modernity, translated modernity, alternative modernity, and anti-modernity?

Through a global and comparative lens, the course examines their experiments in narrative technique, such as stream-of-consciousness, magical realism, and unreliable narrators, as differently situated responses to the major events and problems of the twentieth century. By emphasizing the connections between text and context, this course asks students to reflect on the role of the individual in community and consider literature as a vehicle for thinking about our ethical responsibilities to a global history of violence. Students complete several papers designed to improve their critical thinking by analyzing literature as thematic and formal expressions of historical concerns.

This course satisfies HUB units in the three following areas: Critical Thinking; the Individual in Community, and Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings.

EN215/XL325 A1 Liu

TR 2:00 – 3:15p