Global Arc

A detailed discussion of different bodies of theatrical literature, with emphasis and choice of materials varying from year to year. The focus will be on a group of related plays falling within a specific historical period, the developing work of one playwright, or the relationships among thematics, characterization, and structure. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Courses offered under this rubric will investigate ethical questions in literature. Topics will range from a critical study of the textual forms these questions take to a historical study of an issue traditionally debated by both literature and ethics (responsibility, rhetoric, justice, violence, oppression). Two lectures, one preceptorial.

How does Beowulf work as a poem? In this course, we will find out, learning the poem through close study of its manuscript context and of its literary and historical milieux. We will examine its genre; sources of and analogues to it; its metrics; its place in theories of oral performance; codicological problems (e.g., why the manuscript looks as it does; how paleography helps to date the poem); and its historical and cultural settings. Tune up your harp, sharpen your wits, and find out why this poem is first in collections of English literature.

How do novels represent the global? How have new media systems and economic exchange transformed not only the way novels are produced and distributed but also the internal form of the literary works themselves? This course examines how writers register the interconnected nature of modern life and the narrative strategies that they invent to make sense of migration, war, urbanization, and financialization. Students will learn interdisciplinary methods for reading literature's potential for sociological and historical knowledge by considering how the global novel grapples with empire and what political futures it forecloses and opens up.

Epic poetry is like a blockbuster film (with war, sex, downfall, exaltation) and was considered "the best and most accomplished kind of poetry" in the Renaissance. Four-hundred years later, its greatest practitioners are rarely read. Our course aims to compensate for this neglect by immersing students in the greatest eddies of epic activity from two interrelated vantage points. First, Milton's Paradise Lost, that culmination of the entire (neo)classical epic tradition. And second, disability studies, which interrogates how certain physical and mental features (often coded as deviations from the able-bodied norm) become stigmatized.

An introduction to the cross-cultural study of American literatures, with special attention to the multiple points of connection, conflict, dialogue, and exchange that characterize American writings. Texts may be drawn from a broad range of periods, regions, and cultures. One lecture, two classes.

American literature from the early colonial period to the Civil War.

An exploration of the emergence and development of the American short story from the early nationalist period through romanticism and realism to naturalism and an emerging modernism. Students will be introduced to the major themes and techniques of the writers who shaped the short story in the United States into a versatile and powerful literary form. The course also explores the aesthetic and historical values that mark the development of this genre over the course of the 19th century.

This course introduces students to the range of the essay form as it has developed from the early modern period to our own. The class will be organized, for the most part, chronologically, beginning with the likes of Bacon and Hobbes, and ending with some contemporary examples of and reflections on the form. It will consider how writers as various as Sidney, Hume, Johnson, Emerson, Woolf, C.L.R. James, and Stephen Jay Gould have defined and revised The Essay. Two lectures, one 50-minute preceptorial.

Authors and theorists of contemporary fiction have turned to various modes of fictionality, speculation, and the counterfactual to address and encounter gaps in the historical record, even if not to fully recover experiences lost to time. "Historical Fiction / Fictional History" will introduce students to literary and critical methods by toggling between "historical" and "fictional" texts, and ask them to experiment creatively with their own narrative voices. This course includes a mandatory field trip on 2/26 to see "Hamilton" in New York.