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 9:05 – 9:55a

EN 221 B1 Staff

MWF 12:10 – 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

TR 11:00 – 12:15p

 

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

TR 2:00 – 3:15p

 

————————————————————————————————————————

Fall 2024 Courses that Fulfill English Major Requirements: 

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: EN 326, EN 341
  • Pre-1900 American Literature: EN 345
  • Critical Methods: EN 465, EN471, EN 486
  • Diverse Literatures in English:  EN 326, EN327, EN 356, EN 465, EN 486, EN 537, EN574

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 465, EN471, EN 486
  • Power, Identity, and Difference: EN 326, EN327, EN 356, EN 465, EN 486, EN 537, EN574
  • British or American Literature before 1700: EN 326, EN 363
  • British or American Literature, 1700-1900: EN 341, EN 345

*Please note again that the same course cannot be used fulfill two separate requirements. I.e.: students may choose to count EN 452 either as a “Critical Methods” course or as a “Diverse Literatures in English,” but they may not have EN 452 count as both

 ———————————————————————————————————————-

 

 

Arts of Gender – The Nature of Gender

While the medieval world did not have words like “queer” or “transgender” to define iterations of the human experience, it also did not have terms like “heterosexual” or “cisgender.” Modern ideas like “heterosexuality” and “heteronormativity” do not structure medieval sexuality or gender precisely because “normal” had not yet been constructed. Before the advent of the “normal,” medieval society was instead structured around the category of the “natural”. Our class will focus on the role of “nature” as a structuring tool of embodiment and being in medieval texts. Reading medieval and early modern literature and drama alongside recent scholarship in gender and sexuality studies and queer ecologies, we will attend to the multiple and mutable forms of the premodern body. From anthropomorphic mandrakes to “sins against nature” to castrated theologians, medieval depictions of gender and sexuality were often shaped by discourses on nature. Our medieval and early modern readings will include an Arabic epic of a powerful warrior “The Tale of Princess Fatima,” medieval adaptations of Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe, a thirteenth-century French romance about a daughter raised as a son, a fifteenth-century Welsh woman’s “Ode to the Vagina,” an adaptation of John Lyly’s sixteenth-century play “Galatea” by trans and queer creatives, and “The Little Hours” (2017), a film loosely based on stories from Boccaccio’s “Decameron”. Assignments include several literary analysis papers, a review of a gender/sexuality studies article, collaborative discussion leadership, and a final paper. This course fulfills BU Hub requirements: Aesthetic Exploration, The Individual in Community.

EN 326 A1 Goodrich

TR 12:30 – 1:45p

 

Topics in American Literature

Topic: Native American Literature and the Environment

Indigenous territories are often at the forefront of extractive industries such as drilling, mining, fracking, as well as recent pipeline projects. From damming projects in the early 20th century to Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline, infrastructural projects have repeatedly threatened Native sovereignty and communities’ access to their lands and waters. In light of these extractive histories, our course will ask: How do Native American authors write about the environment, particularly in the face of climate change, resource extraction, and diminishing land and water use rights? This course will survey recent fiction, poetry, and new media by Native American and First Nations authors which focus on Indigenous relationships to land, territory, and non-human entities. Authors will include Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Cherie Dimaline, Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, and Craig Santos Perez alongside critical readings in Native American studies and ecocriticism.

Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration.

EN 327 B1  Hunziker

TR 9:30-10:45

 

History of the Novel in English

Beginning with Cervantes’s immortal Don Quixote and moving through early fictions by Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress), Aphra Behn (Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave), Eliza Haywood (Love in Excess), Samuel Richardson (selections from Pamela and Clarissa), Henry Fielding (Joseph Andrews), Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey), and Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), this course will investigate the early history of the English language novel.  Our exploration of the novel will be both critical and creative.  We will analyze some of the social, political, religious, and economic factors that contributed to the development of prose fiction.  As the prevalence of female authors in our reading list indicates, this course will seek to understand the prominent role female authors play in the history of the novel.  In addition to these critical questions, we will also engage our readings in ways that are broadly aesthetic, as well as creative.  Some of the works we will read remain popular today; others have faded and are mainly found on school syllabi.  What explains the longevity of some works and the shorter shelf life of others?  You are encouraged to develop your own aesthetics of the novel, examining how and whether these novels succeed as art.  Additional readings will include works of philosophy, theology, history, biography, literary criticism, and journalism that accompanied the development of prose fiction, and commented upon it.

Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking.

EN 341 A1 Prince

TR 9:30 – 10:45a

 

19th Century American Fiction

Full description forthcoming. Development of prose fiction in the United States. Cannot be taken for credit in addition to CAS EN 545. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area(s): Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.

EN345 A1 Bjornson

TR 12:30 – 1:45p

 

Topics in Modern Literature

Topic: British and Irish Modernism

Virginia Woolf once observed, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Alongside this change, “there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.” The moment in question was the birth of modernism, an artistic movement that produced some of the greatest works of the 20th Century. Woolf’s epitaph would beckon in the turbulent period, one marked by waning empire and decolonization, global warfare, rapidly advancing technology, and complex social change. In literature, modernism was defined by a forceful reaction against earlier modes of writing, and authors embraced the avant-garde in an attempt to represent the new sensibilities, hopes, and horrors of their time. Modernist writers captured the idea that nothing in their world felt stable, not even the earth beneath them—“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” W. B. Yeats famously wrote. Throughout this course, then, we will confront modernism’s radical ambition and aesthetic innovations to see how it grappled with the changing pace of life and human character.

EN 348 A1 Hernández

TR 3:30-4:45

 

Contemporary American Fiction

US prose fiction from the last few decades, exploring questions of individualism, community, identity, technology, media, religious belief, violence, post-WWII political changes, and our relation to history. Authors may include Roth, Robinson, DeLillo, Pynchon, Morrison, and Lahiri, among others. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, The Individual in Community.

EN349 A1 Walsh

MWF 11:15 – 12:05p

 

Drama and Performance, 1945-Present

How have theater and performance affected our understandings of self-making, narrative form, and social formation in the contemporary moment? Can theatrical empathy help or hinder social change? To answer this question, this course presents an overview of drama from roughly 1945 to today. Playwrights may include Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Maria Irene Fornes, Ntozake Shange, Susan-Lori Parks, Cherríe Moraga, Philip Kan Gotanda, Anna Deveare Smith, Luis Valdez, Lorraine Hansberry, and Young Jean Lee. The course will approach these plays through the lens of performance theory, blurring the line between the aesthetic and the social. Students will also have an opportunity to see new work at CompanyONE, the American Repertory Theatre, and the Boston Playwrights’ Theater, pending availability. Fulfills the Power, Identity, and Difference Requirement.

EN356 A1 Rivera

MWF 2:30 – 3:20p

 

Toni Morrison’s American Times

Examines how Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, and Love depict crucial times in American history, using historical and literary sources to make visible the interactions between the world of the novel and that of American history. Effective Fall 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing Intensive, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking (WIN, GIC, and CRT). Prerequisites: First-Year Writing Seminar (WR100/120 or equivalent) Course previously numbered CAS EN370. Course cannot be taken for credit in addition to CAS EN370.

EN 360/AA  305 A1 Boelcskevy

MWF 2:30 – 3:20

 

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.

EN363 A1  Glider

MWF 09:05 – 9:55a

 

Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

An exploration of the literature of the “New Negro Renaissance” or, more popularly, the Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1935. Discussions of essays, fiction, and poetry, three special lectures on the stage, the music, and the visual arts of the Harlem Renaissance. Effective Spring 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: one previous literature course or junior or senior standing.

CAS EN 377 Boelcskevy

MWF 12:20 – 1:10p

 

Auteur Filmmaking

Description forthcoming.

EN385/CI352 A1 TBD

TR 3:30 – 4:45p

 

Description forthcoming.

EN397/CI430/AA430 A1 Staff

TR 12:30 – 1:45p

 

Critical Studies in Literature and Society

Topic: Border Studies / Critical Forced Displacement Studies 

The US southern border is regularly cited as a “crisis” in the popular press, and both main American political parties regularly advance their agendas in relation to the border, which will almost certainly play a tremendous role in the 2024 election season. What makes this border so important to US political imaginaries, cultural constructions, and identity performances? This course will use the US southern border to explore two intersecting critical fields: border studies and critical forced displacement studies. Border studies has emerged since the 1980’s as an interdisciplinary field 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 literary and activist projects. Critical forced displacement studies is a new field that builds on refugee and migration studies with the insights of gender theory, critical studies of race and ethnicity, and disability studies. We will define forced displacement as a process of coercive violations or unjust omissions that disrupt a person or community’s ability to live a dignified life—one in accordance with their norms and values—in their current or historic place of residence. Critical forced displacement studies (CFDS), shifts attention away from the focus on identities, individual persecution, and present migration patterns leading to border crossings, all of which are central to refugee studies. Instead, CFDS emphasizes communities and cultural productions, histories of human mobility/immobility, and global structures and systems. Alongside theoretical texts, we will read literature by and about displaced communities and track discourses on borders and displacement in contemporary media. 

EN465 B1 Preston 

MWF 10:10 – 11:00

 

 

Critical Studies in American Literature: Reading U.S. Empire

 

In How to Hide an Empire, historian Daniel Immerwahr asks: “When have you ever seen a map of the United States that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, or any of the other smaller islands the United States has annexed over the years?” While the U.S. has owned and occupied overseas territories since the late nineteenth century, these spaces are often missing from our conceptions of what America looks like, and likewise, what American literature looks like. Following this lead, this course will ask: How might we account for an American literary canon that includes the U.S.’s overseas territories, or takes as its foundation the U.S.’s occupation of Native American lands? How do authors address the legacies of empire in their visions of U.S.?

This course surveys U.S. literature and criticism about American empire, including texts by African American, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Asian American authors. We will discuss works from several overseas U.S. territories (Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, the Marshall Islands, American Samoa) and will also read fiction set in Native North America. Authors will include Toni Morrison, Gina Apostol, Craig Santos Perez, Linda Hogan, and Thi Bui, among others. This class will also introduce students to critical conversations on race, indigeneity, militarism, and settler colonialism.

 

EN471 A1 Hunziker

 

TR 12:30-1:45

 

Critical Studies in Anglophone Literature: Anglophone Caribbean Poetry

A study of mostly twentieth-century Caribbean poetry written in English(es), partly through anthologies and partly concentrating on major figures (Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, Kamau Brathwaite of Barbados, Lorna Goodison of Jamaica, Eric Roach of Trinidad and Tobago). We will be reading with attention to issues that lie behind the poems, often expressed in debates about such matters as the function of the poet in a small society, creole vs standard language, oral vs literate aesthetic norms, and the relation to literary traditions (African and European) in an atmosphere of cultural nationalism and independence. These are not just more poems in English that happen to be from an unusual place; we are going to be thoughtful about challenges that arise for us as readers due to what the writers themselves sometimes refer to as the “West Indianness” of the work. We will for example have to come to terms with various languages of expression (standard, non-standard, and creole), varied media of distribution (different print media, live and recorded performance) and unfamiliar fields of reference.  Other challenges will certainly arise; for example, we will find that secondary research material in this field is often difficult to track down and access, so that we need to develop aptitude in working around these limitations.

 

EN 486 A1 Breiner

MWF 12:20 – 1:10p

 

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 5:00 – 6:15p

 

Black Women & Life Writing

When society is designed to limit your life chances, surviving so that you might one day thrive requires deliberate effort and purpose-driven strategies. Black women are therefore some of the most intellectually rigorous citizens on the planet. In this class, we will explore works by Black women who have chosen to write about their lives. To honor each author’s rigor, we will focus on the deliberate choices about craft that shape their texts and the deliberate choices that shaped the lives represented by their well-crafted narratives. To bolster our critical and literary awareness, we will also consult research on biography, autobiography, memoir, and the distinctions among them.

Students should register for this course only if they are also willing to hone their oral presentation skills. Public speaking is a top fear among Americans; college-educated people need practice.

Likely texts include: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (2014); Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred (2021); Uché Blackstock, MD, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (2024).

EN574 A1 Mitchell

TR 5:00 – 6:15 (Will be available on the University Schedule shortly)