Upper-level Undergraduate Courses in Language and Literature
Academic Year 2024-2025, Semester II
All courses carry 4 credits, unless otherwise indicated.
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Advanced Undergraduate Courses
Spring 2025 Courses that Fulfill English Major Requirements:
Please note that a class may not be used to fulfill more than one distribution requirement.
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: EN333, EN 364, EN 522
- Pre-1900 American Literature: EN 333, EN 334
- Critical Methods: EN 406, EN 452, EN 474, EN 486, EN 488
- Diverse Literatures in English: EN327, EN 347, EN360, EN371, EN 452, EN 486, EN 488, EN 560, EN 596
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 406, EN 452, EN 474, EN 486, EN 488,
- Power, Identity, and Difference: EN327, EN 347, EN360, EN371, EN 452, EN 486, EN 488, EN 560, EN 596
- British or American Literature before 1700: EN 364, EN 522
- British or American Literature, 1700-1900: EN 333, EN 334
*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.
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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
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Wandering and Refuge in the Premodern World
The epics of Homer and Virgil, the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, the medieval romances, and the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Milton, all return to stories of wandering and refuge. Whether as a consequence of warfare, imperial aggression, natural disasters, or inward turmoil, the characters at the heart of these works are unmoored from one world and in search of another. We will explore the genres of epic and romance as literatures of migration and displacement, from the classical and medieval world to contemporary rewritings in our own present moment.
How might these stories of loss, dislocation, and recovery resonate in a world of ongoing geopolitical instability and climate emergency, driving new trajectories of human movement? Readings include The Iliad, Trojan Women, and The Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Petrarch’s Africa, Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberata, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and contemporary reinterpretations of epic, including Neruda’s Canto General, Walcott’s Omeros, and Darwish’s State of Siege.
EN 221 B1 Glider
TR 11:00 – 12:15p
Environmental Humanities and Society
How do our imaginations and cultural practices shape the way we perceive and respond to environments and the forces alive within them? How do animals, plants and other forms of life shape the places they share with humans, and the stories people tell about them? Do these more-than-human beings make their own meaning, and how can we learn to observe and understand what these may be? Are different environments suited to particular kinds of stories, genres, aesthetic visions, societies? How does climate generate historical change? How do stories told by environmental and climate scientists to the general public draw upon literary and social conventions, and how can such science narratives and communication be strengthened by humanistic knowledge? How do ethics of environmental stewardship emerge from diverse cultural imaginaries, social practices, and power relations? Can we theorize societies as including animals, plants, and other organisms, and how might that expand conventional notions of power, social relationships, kinship, work, sex/gender, and other social science concepts? To begin to answer these questions, we will explore novels, poetry, film, nonfiction writing, rituals, ethnographies, and visual art from different cultural traditions that illuminate diverse human understandings of and relations to “nature,” environmental change, loss and extinction, longing and belonging, justice and power. Effective Spring 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU HUB areas: Writing-Intensive, Ethical Reasoning, Aesthetic Exploration.
EN 230/EE 230 A1 Craciun and Scaramelli
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
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
MWF 10:10 – 11:00a
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
MWF 12:20 – 1:10p
Topics in American Literature: Fictions of the Modern American South
How has the US South been represented in American literature, film, and other media from the 20th century to the present? Why is the region portrayed in such conflicting ways, and as so different from the rest of the country? Why does the symbolism of the Southern past remain so prominent in social and political conflicts today? How are fictions of the South confirmed or undercut by the realities of the region? In contemporary works that reimagine historical slavery, for example, such as Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad (with movie and miniseries adaptations), or that address slavery’s continuing legacy in today’s racism, such as Jordan Peele’s film Get Out; in recent novels like Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, and in endless television dramas, Southern reality shows, and music videos—the South continues to function prominently in our country’s imaginative life, its significance central in debates about who we are as a nation. Course includes major writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Edward Jones, Lan Cao, and Jesmyn Ward, along with other media artists. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration.
EN327 A1 Matthews
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Film Genres and Movements
Spring 2025 topic: Avant Garde Film
Visionary films of delirious subversion, hallucinatory images and kinetic abstractions, dynamic experiments with time, memory and perception – avant-garde cinema has everything. In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the rich history of avant-garde and experimental film and video production across the 20th and 21st century, discovering the many ways that artists and filmmakers have struggled to articulate new ways of seeing and new ways of being. Along the way, we will sample a number of major avant-garde currents—the high modernist interwar cinema of dadaism and surrealism, trance films, structuralism, feminist and queer cinema, video art, minimalism, black radicalism, found footage films, installation work, and experimental ethnography. As we work to place these diverse movements in their artistic, intellectual and political context, students will also be encouraged to experiment with films of their own, pursuing creative projects that invite them to test the imaginable limits of sound and image. Films by Deren, Brakhage, Anger, Warhol, Akerman, Julien, Farocki, Dorsky, Benning, Hopinka, Snow and others. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Digital/Multimedia Expression, and Creativity/Innovation.
EN 329/CI 330 A1 Foltz
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
American Literature: Beginnings to 1860
An introduction to the multiple literary traditions of North America (especially that area that would come to be the United States) from the close of the fifteenth century through 1855. Authors include John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Susanna Rowson, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
EN 333 A1 Howell
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
American Literature: Civil War to World War 1
This course studies the vibrant literature of the United States from the Civil War to the first decade of the 20th century. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area(s): Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness. Fulfills the Pre-1900 American Literature Requirement.
EN334 A1 Mitchell
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Topics in Contemporary Fiction: Imagining Decolonization
This course examines how international authors depicted the historical transition from a world of colonial empires to a world of nation-states. Authors discussed may include Andric, Abrahams, Salih, Naipaul, Dangarembga, Adichie. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy.
EN347 A1 Krishnan
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Poetry of War
Poetry is, ideally, one of the most powerful and concise forms of literary expression. For this reason, it is uniquely appropriate for exploring the violence, waste, madness and beauty of human warfare. For the same reason, it is uniquely susceptible to abuse by those who wish to misrepresent the reality of warfare for political purposes. Beginning with ancient and mythological warfare as it has been depicted by Homer and Vergil and updated by Christopher Logue and other contemporary poets and translators, this course will survey the forms of war poetry (narrative, lyric and dramatic), mostly in English, responding to four modern wars: the American Civil War (1861-65), the First World War (1914-18), the Second World War (1939-45), and the American war in Vietnam (1955-1975). Because human civilization has been in a state of warfare for most of its history, each student in this class will be invited to research and present to the rest of the class—either individually or in a group with one or two other class members— the poetry (and history) of a war other than these four major conflicts. These presentations may also include discussion of the relation of poetry to other art forms (fiction; journalism; memoir; drawing/painting; cinema; documentary; music; dance), in the depiction of and commentary on war.
EN 354 A1 Kirchwey
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
Shakespeare II
Six or seven plays chosen from the following: Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
EN 364 A1 Glider
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Haruki Murakami and His Sources
Students read works by Haruki Murakami and by writers who shaped him or were shaped by him, reflect on the nature of intertextuality, and gain a perspective on contemporary literature as operating within a global system of mutual influence. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 369 A1 Zielinska-Elliott
MWF 11:15a – 12:05p
Introduction to African American Women Writers
This course studies the cultural contexts and the ongoing relevance of significant works by African American Women Writers. Works by Jacobs, Butler, Harper, Hurston, Brooks, Kincaid, Morrison and Marshall complemented by critical articles lay out this rich tradition. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking.
EN370 A1 Boelcskevy
TR 12:30 – 1:45P
Topics in Literature and Film
Major themes and techniques explored by both writers and filmmakers. May be repeated for credit as topics change. Two sections are being offered for the Spring 2025 semester.
Russian and East European Film
Examination of a series of masterpieces by filmmakers from “the other Europe.” Explores both the stylistic aspects and the role of film as a social and political commentary in socialist and post-socialist periods. No prerequisites. In English.
EN375 A1 Vidan
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Critical Theory and the Politics of Cinema
An exploration of cinema’s relationship to power and ideology through key texts in the critical theory tradition, from Marx and Engels to the Frankfurt School, Black British cultural studies, and feminist film theory.
EN375 B1 Denison
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Auteur Filmmaking
Full descriptions forthcoming.
Two sections are being offered for the Spring 2025 semester. Both fulfill a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration.
Céline Sciamma & Sébastien Lifshitz
This course centers on the fiction films of Céline Sciamma and the documentaries of Sébastien Lifshitz, two contemporary French auteurs who explore themes of childhood, female adolescence, gender identity, and LGBTQ+ representation. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration.
EN385/CI352 A1 Cazenave
T 3:30 – 6:15p
History of Criticism II
Survey of perspectives and trends in critical theory relevant to literary interpretation from the middle of the twentieth century onward, including structuralism, post-structuralism, gender and race studies, cultural theory, post-colonial studies, environmental criticism. Frequent writing assignments of various lengths. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area(s): Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings.
EN 406 A1 Matthews
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Asian American Studies: Theories and Methods
A brief overview of the theories and methods of Asian American studies across the humanities and social sciences to define a mode of inquiry and action inspired by legacies of activism, art, and survival from Asian diasporas in the United States, as a response to racism, exploitation, and empire. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings.
EN452 A1 Rivera
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
Critical Studies in Literary Genres: Espionage Fiction
This iteration of “Critical Studies in Literary Genres” explores the birth and development of espionage fiction in the 20th century. We will identify the genre’s origins and trace its development through the Cold War. In doing so, we’ll cover topics like the detective story, colonial adventure, invasion fiction, and the domestic terror/revolutionary plot. This course also studies some of espionage fiction’s greatest works that engage with WWII and Cold War era spy craft and interrogates the relationship between “high” literary modernism and the “lowly” pulp genre of the spy novel. This course will cover theoretical topics alongside literary readings and will be relevant to students interested in the following areas: global politics, colonialism, imperialism, and empire studies; genre studies, narrative theory, and literary theory; gender and sexuality studies, masculinity; and existentialism and moral philosophy.
EN474 A1 Hernandez
MWF 9:05 – 9:55a
Studies in Anglophone Literature: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature
Examines how Anglophone writers have explored themes of historical upheaval and psychological transformation in the colonial world. We read criticism by Lukacs, Auerbach, Williams, and Said. Fiction by Rhys, Coetzee, Adichie, and others.
EN486 A1 Krishnan
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Topics in African-American Literature: 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-wrought 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.
Required texts: 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).
EN488 Mitchell
TR 5:00 – 6:15p
Critical Studies in Literary Topics: Literature and Conceptions of Time 1750-1930
Between 1750 and 1930, momentous changes in technology (time-keeping at sea, extraction of coal, the railway, the telegraph, photography) and paradigm-shifting scientific theories (geology, astronomy, Darwinian evolution and thermodynamics) inspired the re-conception of time both in the sciences and in popular imagination. Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the standardization of time; the twentieth saw Newton’s notion of absolute time fundamentally shaken. These developments had new, strange, and contradictory implications for understanding time, implications that fired the imaginations of many of the writers in this period. We explore the different models of time that 18th- and 19th-century and Modernist writers draw on when crafting their literary works. What happens to the human time scale when you set it next to millions of years? Why does Woolf elongate one moment and shrink major events into a parenthesis? How do writers convey the feeling of simultaneity? Is time measurable, absolute and objective, or fluid, relative and subjective? Literary authors include Jane Austen, Olaudah Equiano, Alfred Tennyson, Tom Stoppard, H.G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf.
We will explore these historical questions while learning to identify, analyze and evaluate narratives at work in a wide range of discourses: colonial, historical, autobiographical, scientific, exploratory, and literary. A key goal of the course is to recognize narratives that are explicitly and implicitly at work in a range of explanatory accounts, and to practice questioning the narratives of inevitability, progress, or doom that swirl around in 2025. We will think through competing and contradictory models of change over time.
We will ask how narratives open questions up and close those questions down, what events punctuate a narrative, and what creates a sense of closure. We will pay close attention to how and when an author releases information to the reader over time.
EN495/695 A1 Henchman
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
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. 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
Modern English Grammar & Style
Modern English Grammar & Style is a course in the grammar of Standard American English (SAE) and in contemporary English prose style. While the course focuses especially on the written form of SAE, it explores other varieties of English and strives to cultivate an appreciation for all forms of language. Systematic analysis of sentences and longer units of discourse will deepen your understanding of the social and cultural implications of grammatical and stylistic choices and help you become a more informed and capable reader, speaker, and writer.
EN 513 A1 Bizup
TR 9:30-10:45p
Disability Voices
This course introduces students to the field of disability studies. It examines disability studies approaches to literature and culture, interrogating how disability is represented in fiction, poetry, art, and cinema. We will invoke the concept of narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000) to study not only disability representation but also disability’s role in storytelling. This course centers embodied experience and will thus appeal to students interested in the intersections of art and gender, sexuality, medicine, disease, disability, and race. Disability is omnipresent, and we will thus examine representation across history, region, and disciplinary boundaries. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Research and Information Literacy.
EN 560 A1 Hernandez
MWF 10:10 – 11:00a
Studies in Auteur Filmmaking
Topic for Spring 2025: Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Aesthetic Exploration, Research and Information Literacy.
EN 564 A1 Denison
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Film and Media Theory
Introduction to film and media theory as a mode of inquiry. What happens when we render the world as an image? How do cinematic images differ from other forms of image-making? What does it mean to be a spectator? Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Research and Information Literacy.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Research and Information Literacy.
EN 569 A1 Desilets
TR 5:00 – 6:15p