Global Arc

A study of Chaucer's art with reference to the intellectual, social, and literary conventions of the Middle Ages. The course introduces the student by this means to the characteristically medieval aspects of Chaucer's poetry. Two 90-minute seminars.

This course concentrates on a constitutive problem in OE literature: the theme of "making" and "makers". What powers does a text assume when it makes an inanimate object speak? What temporal and spatial fantasies about English origins and ambitions do OE texts build? What ideas of identity? We'll scrutinize authorship, too, asking how one learned and shaped the poet's role, and how OE texts represented literary composition and understood the tools of singing and writing. Each dramatic, dynamic text we'll encounter asks us to think about how words shape and fabricate the worlds of the OE period.

This course will look to the many narratives and histories that comprise the multiple worlds of Latinx Literatures. How does the term Latinx respond to questions of gender and language? What does the history of naming this pan-ethnic group tell us about U.S. racial-ethnic categories? How do borders become an occasion to rethink space and psyche, as well as entangled crisis? Taking a hemispheric approach, this course will examine how Latinx texts lend imagination and poetic vision to the experience of migration, the movements of diaspora, and the lasting effects of colonization.

A study of Shakespeare's plays, covering the first half of his career. Emphasis will be on each play as a work of art and on Shakespeare's development as a poet and dramatist. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

A study of Shakespeare's plays, covering the second half of his career. Emphasis will be on each play as a work of art and on Shakespeare's development as a poet and dramatist. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

A study of Milton's poetry and prose, with particular attention to Milton's poetic style and development and his indebtedness to various classical traditions. Emphasis will also be given to Milton as thinker and to the place he holds in 17th-century thought. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course will at different times deal with particular currents of literature and thought in the 18th century, or with individual authors. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course will at different times deal with particular currents of literature and thought in the 18th century, or with individual authors. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

A study of major figures from the Augustan Age through the Age of Johnson: Swift, Pope, Fielding, Boswell, Johnson, Sterne, and Blake. Selections include a wide range of literary types from Gulliver's Travels and Joseph Andrews to Boswell's London Journal and Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

A study of the young writers who defined English literary culture, especially the Romantic movement, in Regency and late Georgian England. Course material will include poetry, prose, and fiction, with emphasis on close reading as well as cultural contexts. Among the major figures to be studied are the Shelleys, Byron, and Keats. Two 90-minute seminars.