Upper-level Undergraduate Courses in Language and Literature
Academic Year 2023-2024, Semester II
All courses carry 4 credits, unless otherwise indicated.
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Core Sequence
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
EN 221 B1 Walsh
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
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 Breiner
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
EN 322 B1 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
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Advanced Undergraduate Courses
Spring 2024 Courses that Fulfill English Major Requirements:
Please note that a class may not be used to fulfill more than one distribution requirement.
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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 333, EN 341, EN 364, EN 570
- Pre-1900 American Literature: EN 333
- Critical Methods: EN 406, EN 477, EN 482; EN 486
- Diverse Literatures in English: EN 326, EN348, EN 360, EN390, EN 477, EN 482, EN 486, EN 562, EN 570
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 477, EN 482, EN 486
- Power, Identity, and Difference: EN 326, EN348, EN 360, EN390, EN 477, EN 482, EN 486, EN 562, EN 570**
- British or American Literature before 1700: EN 322, EN 326, EN 364, EN 570
- British or American Literature, 1700-1900: EN 323, EN 333, EN 341
*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
** EN570 is petitionable for PID requirement credit in Spring ’24 only. Please contact instructor for details.
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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
MWF 11:15a – 12:05p
Film Noir (Hello, Darkness)
Pools of shadow, post-war malaise, existential dread, masculinity in crisis, melodramatic violence, and dark stylistic excess – film noir has it all. This course offers a broad survey of one of the most stylish and influential genres: film noir. With its classic films often made by exiled European directors working in America during the height of World War II, and first celebrated by French critics in the post-war period, film noir is at once quintessentially “American” and thoroughly transnational. We will watch important early examples of the genre before charting its baroque evolution into the late ‘40s and ‘50s and beyond, finally investigating the rise of international and contemporary neo-noir cinemas. Films by John Huston, Ida Lupino, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Jacques Tourneur, Carl Franklin, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Akira Kurosawa, among others. The course carries HUB credits in Aesthetic Exploration, Digital/Multimedia Expression, and Creativity/Innovation.
EN 329/CI 300 A1 Foltz
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
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.
Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
EN 333 A1 Howell
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
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 2:00 – 3:15p
Topics in Modern Literature: New World Modernism
The roaring 1920s was a decade that saw the flourishing of modernist literature and art as well as social and technological upheaval. The same writers who revolutionized the aesthetics of the novel and the form of the poem also witnessed the decline of empire; the devastation of two world wars; and new constellations in the politics of gender, sexuality, and race in what has been called the Jazz Age. There has been longstanding interest in the formal experimentalism of modernist literature, but we have yet to comprehend and compare how Black writers in the New World critically engaged and revised the complex and enduring legacy of modernist innovation. This course examines how intercultural dialogue across racial and national frontiers shaped the development of modernism in both the U.S. and the Caribbean. We begin with aesthetic experimentation in works that revisit the myth of the American frontier, and then trace the emergence of transatlantic and so-called “high” modernism, exploring themes such as the cultural consequences of living abroad, gender inequality, and racial violence. Turning next to Black authors affiliated with the New Negro Renaissance, the Black Chicago Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and Global South, we examine their revisionary engagements with modernism. Possible authors include Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eric Walrond, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, and Derek Walcott.
EN 348 A1 Patterson
MWF 1:25 – 2:15p
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
F 11:15 – 2:00
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.
Effective Spring 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness
EN 364 A1 Siemon
TR 11:00a-12:15p
Studies in Non-Cinematic Media
Spring 2024 topic: Marvel Cinematic Universe
This course explores the economic, political, and aesthetic implications of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe.” How does the MCU’s interlocking multimedia meganarrative give the impression of a “universe,” and how does that universe interact with the one we live in? Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 365/CI 367 A1 Desilets
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. Effective Spring 2021, 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
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. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativitv/Innovation.
EN 375 / CI 390 A1 Denison
TR 3:30 – 4:45p
Auteur Filmmaking
Topic for Spring 24 -Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky & Co.
The course examines the concept of “Slow Cinema” through a selection of theoretical writings and films by auteurs who first explored this approach such as Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Parajanov and Kiarostami, and more recent works by Tarr, Zvyagintsev, Ceylan and Mungiu. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration.
EN 385 / CI 352 A1 Vidan
Meeting pattern TBD
Topics in Comparative Literature
Spring 2024 Topic: Race, Sex and Technology
This course focuses on current and historical relationships between issues of race and transformations in technology, ranging from analog, electronic and digital media, internet cultures, science fiction and non-fiction, and artificial intelligence. Though these works may be routed through unfamiliar disciplines and techniques, students should know that they are rooted in literary and cultural criticism. In other words, this is not a “tech” class but a humanities/literature class that engages the extraordinary technological transformations all around us today and explores how they are linked to older and continually transformative and intersecting issues of race, sex, migration, and culture. Authors may include, Ruha Benjamin, Charlton McIlwain, Samuel R. Delany, Safiya Umoja Noble, Karel Capek and Stephanie Dinkins.
EN 390 A1 Chude-Sokei
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
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 9:30 – 10:45a
Black Diaspora Theory and Practice
This course explores “diaspora” as a keyword for Black Studies and trains students to intervene in the discourse surrounding the term’s emergence, usage, and many theorizations. This critical theory course examines the formation of black diasporic culture and consciousness with particular attention to black genders and sexualities. Priority: cornerstone and cutting-edge texts of diaspora theory; complemented with analyses of memoir, fiction, poetry, and visual art. This course involves collaboration, peer feedback, revision practices, and position papers. 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. EN Major: PDI; Concepts/Methods. AFAMBDS Major: Global; Gender/Sexuality; Seminar.
EN 477/AA 477 A1 Owen
MWF 3:35 – 4:25p
Critical Approaches to Global Literature
This course examines how creative writers and historians have depicted the historical transition from a world of colonial empires to a world of nation-states. Novelists discussed may include Abrahams, Salih, Naipaul, Dangarembga, Adichie. We will also read a number of historical essays on the varied colonial contexts presupposed by these fictional narratives.
Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Aesthetic Exploration.
EN 482 A1 Krishnan
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Critical Studies in Anglophone Literature: Post-colonial Theater
A frequent feature of decolonization is the emergence of a theater movement that aspires to assert the importance of theater for a mature national culture and to represent the distinctiveness of the new nation and its people. In order to support generalizations about such national theater movements, we will read a fairly large number of plays: about 20 (several of them one-acts). The plays are drawn from the work of world-class Anglophone dramatists of the twentieth century in four very different places: Augusta Gregory, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats in Ireland: Derek Walcott and Earl Lovelace in Trinidad; Wole Soyinka and Duro Ladipo in Nigeria; and Athol Fugard and some writers of “township theater” in South Africa. Among the recurrent issues: decisions about the incorporation of national styles of gesture, movement, and speech; choice of language(s) to use and stories to tell in the theater; and negotiation of a relationship with metropolitan traditions of play-writing and theatricality.
EN 486 A1 Breiner
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
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 Geary
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 Walsh
TR 12:30-1:45p
Marxist Cultural Criticism
This course is an introduction to Marxist cultural criticism that examines the transformation of concepts from classic Marxism (Marx, Lukacs, Althusser, Adorno, and Gramsci) into contemporary debates about race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, modernity, and language (Said, Jameson, and Spivak, and others).
Specifically, this course asks: What is a “materialist” interpretation of culture? Are the “material” and the “cultural” mutually exclusive? What are some useful models for the interpretations of culture developed by Marxist and non-Marxist authors, and how do we historicize their differences? How does “culture,” understood as the non-economic sphere of society, relate to “cultures” in the anthropological sense—to the geopolitical spaces in the world? How do Marxist concepts such as reification, alienation, commodity fetishism, symptomatic reading, formal vs. real subsumption, hegemony, and surplus value provide useful tools for thinking about race, gender, and language? In other words, what does Marxism—presumed to be the analysis of economic relations—have to say about culture? Our exploration of the foundational texts in “cultural materialism” will provide useful answers to these questions.
EN 539/XL 530 A1 Liu
T 3:30 – 6:15p
Studies in Asexualities
What is asexuality? Commonly associated with those who “do not experience sexual attraction” but, under critical examination, the keywords “asexual” and “asexuality” quickly give way to a growing body of meanings, feelings, affiliations, associations, and disruptions in life and literature. How might asexuality articulate, collide with, or impact our prevailing understandings and embodiments of sexuality, desire, romance, health, race, nation, gender, legibility, and violence? This writing intensive seminar will explore Asexuality Studies as both experience and analytic in critical theory and in contemporary literature and art, with particular attention to race and disability. HUB: WIN, AEX, IIC. EN Major: PDI
EN 562/WS 562 A1 Owen
W 6:30 – 9:15p
Radical Imaginings: Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, and the Power of Literature
Margaret Cavendish and John Milton lived through the English Revolution, including almost a decade of civil war, continuing battles over the Protestant Reformation, challenges to ideas of gender and sexuality, the explosion of print culture, the emergence of the New Science, shifts in ideologies and practices of slavery, and the early days of England’s development as an imperial power. Though Cavendish took the side of the monarchy, and Milton the side that executed the King, both took revolutionary positions. They shared an intellectual ambition and rigor that led them to explore ideas to their limit, even when those ideas led them to places they were not yet ready and/or did not want to go. Thus, they offer us profound insight into the ways that imaginative literature and political change dance through history together. Living through the century that saw the development of the writer as an “author,” Cavendish and Milton are some of the first English writers to understand themselves as creatures of print. As a result, their work illuminate the way that literature takes shape in a moment of media revolution, with significant resonances with the way the digital age has changed our ideas of authorship and audience. In addition to Milton’s epic Paradise Lost and Cavendish’s proto-science fiction The Blazing World, our readings will also include plays, poems, romances and political tracts. Effective Fall 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
Pre-requisites include two previous literature courses or junior or senior standing; and First-Year Writing (WR 120 or equivalent). The research component of this course will require self-directed work guided by the instructor.
** EN570 is petitionable for PID requirement credit in Spring ’24 only. Please contact instructor for details.
EN 570 A1 Murphy
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Studies in Modern Literature: Irony, Belief, and Fiction
The German novelist Thomas Mann once called irony “the really fruitful, the productive, and hence the artistic principle”: it “glances at both sides,” “plays slyly and irresponsibly … among opposites,” and is “in no great haste to take sides and come to decisions.” In saying this, Mann was following a long tradition that associates irony with the modern novel—a form that juxtaposes different voices, styles, images, and attitudes in ways that make it difficult to pin down the beliefs and ethical commitments of the author. In this course we will examine a number of major post-WWII English-language novels that explore the novel’s dizzying movements between belief and irony, “taking sides” and “playing irresponsibly.” Novels may include Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Ozick’s The Shawl (1983), Erdrich’s Tracks (1988), Ishiguro’s The Artist of the Floating World (1986), Morrison’s Love (2003), Cusk’s Outline (2014). Non-fiction by Mikhail Bakhtin, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lear, and others will allow us to reflect on irony, dialogue, and genre. Through writing exercises, class presentations, and library visits, students will develop their skills as researchers and as critical writers, and they will cap off their semester with a long research paper.
Effective Spring 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Writing Intensive Course, Research and Information Literacy
EN 582 A1 Chodat
M 6:30 – 9:15