Introductory Undergraduate Courses in Language and Literature
Academic Year 2023-2024, Semester II
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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.
EN 101 A1 and B1 Lee and Murphy
TR 09:30 – 10:45a
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. 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.
EN 121 A1 Gutierrez
MWF 9:05 – 9:55a
Medieval Worlds: Medicine, Magic, and Miracles in the Global Middle Ages
Healing in the medieval world took many forms. Prayers, charms, and potions for curing illnesses co-existed with, and sometimes influenced, university medical curriculums, while types of healthcare available largely depended upon the patient’s gender, class, and education level. This class examines a wide variety of works on healing and the body, including medical textbooks like Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine and The Trotula, poetry (e.g. The Roman de Silence and The Dance of Death), religious miracle stories, and magical recipes. Students in this course will grapple with questions like: How do stories about healing and disease affect how we determine bodily autonomy and medical authority? Can we use a variety of genres, including technical handbooks, to think through cultural conceptions of gender, bodies, and medicine? What counts as a literary text? GE seminars provide introductions to the basic methods of the humanities: analytical reading, critical thinking, and scholarly communications. They are also a chance to encounter texts, readings, and ideas that are both rigorous and unusual. To that end, this course will challenge traditional Eurocentric definitions of “the medieval period” by reading texts from across the globe, including Asia, Africa, and the Americas, written between 700-1600. A significant portion of the class will focus on how premodern healing narratives shape medieval and modern understandings of gender, sexuality, and race.
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 Francis
TR 9:30 – 10:45a (the University Schedule will be updated soon)
Jewish Diaspora Literature
How has diaspora shaped Jewish identity, family, and community? How have different generations of Jewish immigrants, victims, survivors, and outsiders, depicted their experiences in literature? How are Jews of color finding new ways to chronicle their experiences and tell their stories? We will discuss novels, memoirs, dramatic works (and films) written in Yiddish, English, and German from the 19th -21st centuries.. Topics include immigration; assimilation; anti-Semitism; self-hatred; translation; food; music; and memory. Meets with JS136 and XL236. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy.
EN 126 A1 Gillman
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Reading American Literature:
Attention to a wide range of literary works and historical and cultural contexts. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, The Individual in Community.
EN 127 A1 Bloechl
MWF 10:10- 11:00a
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)
EN 129/AA 103 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. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Ethical Reasoning.
EN 130 A1 Patterson
MWF 11:15a – 12:05p
Introduction to Fiction
Introduces critical concepts for analyzing works of fiction. Readings in different periods, genres, and traditions, ranging from canonical masterpieces to unheralded literary gems, aimed to cultivate an appetite for the pleasures, and rigors, of narrative art. Topics vary by instructor. This course cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course with the same number that was previously titled “Literary Types: Fiction.” Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Ethical Reasoning.
EN 141 A1 Quinn
MWF 9:05 – 9:55a
Children’s Literature
In the Anglo-American tradition, what do animated toys in children’s literature tell children? What do they reveal about our culture? And how do they shape it? And how have those stories changed from the beginning of the 20th century to the early 21st century? This course centers on works within children’s literature that depict toy fantasy, toy animism, or, in other words, toys that “come alive.” Beginning with the very end of the 19th century (1883) and following through to the early 21st century (2006), this course explores a range of genres within children’s literature including picture books, middle grade novels, and graphic texts. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 150 A1 Panszczyk
TR – time TBD (the University Schedule will be updated soon)
The Ethics of Art
Does art make you good? Can it make you bad? How, if at all, does it shape our ideas of moral character, right action, or a just society? Is it enjoyed “for its own sake”? As hedonistic pleasure? Is it a frivolous waste of time and money? A danger that needs to be censored? An expression of human freedom? An outgrowth of religious tradition and instruction? This course will consider how the relationship between art and ethics has been addressed both historically and in our own age. In the first half, we will look at how the relationship was addressed among certain ancient thinkers (Confucius, Plato, Aristotle), medieval and Reformation Christians (Dante, Calvin), and a selection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American thinkers (Wollstonecraft, Marx. Douglass, Woolf, Du Bois). In the second half of the course, we will consider three fraught topics that have engaged the minds of artists, critics, and moral philosophers in our own time: (1) the nature and importance of friendship, as well as its complications and limits; (2) how intellectual disability is envisioned, embodied, and portrayed; (3) how humans have lived in, understood, and often devastated the natural environment. The range of forms the course will explore—philosophical dialogues, argumentative treatises, documentaries, independent films, plays, literary fiction, children’s books, popular songs, professional academic philosophy—will force us to ask how we ourselves understand the relationship between beauty and justice, the aesthetically pleasing and the morally good.
Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Ethical Reasoning.
EN 162 A1 Chodat
Lecture MW 10:10-11:00
Discussion F 10:10-11:00
Reading Shakespeare 1
A critical introduction to Shakespeare through intensive analyses of six or seven plays. Possible attention to such topics as literary sources, early modern stagecraft, performance history, and contemporary film adaptation. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking.
EN163 A1 Vahamikos
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
The Graphic Novel: Across The Universe
How do readers experience a sense of expansive or compressive time in graphic narratives? What do images say that words cannot? What are the implications of deeper meaning when words and pictures are used in tandem? The simultaneity of the comics page broadens and deepens a story in an instant. Through close reading of early comics as well as modern graphic narratives, with a focus particularly on memoir and nonfiction, students will examine the historical context and authorial decisions within the medium that makes comics a powerful vehicle for storytelling.
Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Digital/Multimedia Expression, Creativity/Innovation.
EN 170 A1 Ruliffson
MWF 11:15a – 12:05p
Introduction to Asian-American Literature
What does it mean to be “Asian American?” What are the racial legacies of U.S. imperial expansion, race-based incarceration, and immigration exclusion? How do these meanings relate to gender and sexuality throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? This course grapples with these questions and more by studying the literature and culture of Americans of Asian ancestry in the United States. Through this class, students will critically engage works of fiction by authors such as Hisaye Yamamoto, Jhumpa Lahiri, R. Zamora Linmark, Maxine Hong Kingston, and lê thi diễm thúy; theater by Frank Chin and Lauren Yee; poetry by Janice Mirikitani, Al Robles, and other more contemporary Asian American poets; essays by Lisa Lowe and Daniel Y. Kim; and graphic novels by Gene Luen Yang and more. Students will interrogate these works through a combination of critical essays and creative writing prompts in order to harness the intellectual vibrancy and ethical and political urgency that Asian American literature engenders. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, The Individual in Community, Teamwork/Collaboration.
EN 177 A1 Rivera
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Literature and Ideas
How does literature relate to philosophy? How do poems and stories explore philosophical beliefs? This course specifically examines the relationship between the written word and the environment. Readings may include nature writing, poetry, fiction, philosophical essays, maps, sermons, and letters, all engaging with broad questions about the connections between nature and conceptions of self, divinity, politics, community, and value. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Critical Thinking.
EN 195 A1 Glover
MWF 1:25 – 2:15
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.
EN 230/EE 230 A1 Craciun and Scaramelli
TR 2:00 – 3:15p