Old and Middle English literature
Medieval English literature is extremely diverse: it offers, among other things, haunting elegies, adventure tales, pious treatises, crude poems, biting social commentary, and flocks of lamenting birds. This course aims to offer a glimpse into these diverse pleasures by focusing on dreams, visions, and encounters in texts from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. We begin with enigmatic poetry that asks what it means to see, before moving through texts that question the relationship between language and meaning, signs and signifiers, ending with a debate about the purpose of discussion-and a man of great authority.
Shakespeare and politics: then and now
All of Shakespeare’s plays are connected to the politics of their time, but at certain points in history, some seemed more obviously “political” than others. In this seminar, we will discuss plays that had a particular political dimension in the early modern period and that have changed in meaning when performed today. Our discussions will focus primarily on Richard II, Henry V, Macbeth, and Hamlet (which should be read in advance), but there will be hints of many others (prior knowledge of which is not expected), including Henry VI Part 2, Coriolanus, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Sir Thomas More.
English Romantic poets
The Romantic period saw one of the great flourishes of creativity in England, especially in poetry, along with a significant radicalization of politics. This course will examine the major poets of the period in their intellectual context, exploring their formal innovations and interests in old traditions as well as their new ideas of identity and politics. We will focus on the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and John Keats, with opportunities to explore the works of Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Robinson, John Clare, and others.
Jane Austen.
In this course, we will be reading Jane Austen’s coming-of-age: Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Emma; Persuasion; and Northanger Abbey. We will read with close critical attention to explore the qualities that have kept these novels among the world’s favorite fiction for nearly two hundred years. We will examine the structure and analyze the style of the six major novels, as well as excerpts (which will be provided) from some of the earlier works and fragments. We will focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English, narrative voice, focus and perspective, irony, dialogue, characterization, and elements of style such as vocabulary and syntax.
Victorian fiction
The great novelists of the Victorian era explored their society, exploring with pathos, passion, and humor its often contradictory values-social aspirations, romantic desire, moral fervor, and religious doubts. By addressing such issues in compelling stories, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy showed how people’s lives were intertwined with the cultural forces of the age.
Modernist literature: poetry and prose
What is “modernist literature” and why do we continue to use this term? Using this central question as a basis for discussion, this lively but intensive course will look at a selection of poetry and prose (by T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats) to examine in detail this experimental, bold period of literature some 100 years later.
Contemporary Writing.
This course will examine how British and Irish writers have responded to the challenge of modernity in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Paying close attention to the relationship between literary form and current events, we will explore the ways in which contemporary authors have shaped their novels, short fiction, poetry, and drama to accommodate and critique the present. Discussions at the seminar range from pressing questions about cultural identity and technology to the current state and infrastructure of the literary landscape.
World literature
“World Literature” is a controversial term and the subject of much debate in literary studies. This course will explore the key debates surrounding the terms “world literature” and “postcolonial studies” as well as the relevant texts that have inspired and complicated these debates. Considering how the circulation of texts affects their reception, this course will examine how and why certain texts are transnational, global, and/or postcolonial.
Feminist Literature and Theory
The word “feminist” was coined in the 1890s, but there have been women writing about and advocating for equal rights for centuries. This course will explore the development of feminist thinking by engaging with a range of critical debates around the theory and practice of feminist writing.