Current Course Offerings
Summer Session I (May 20th-July 2nd)
ENGL-UA 111 - Literatures in English I: Medieval and Early Modern Literatures | Class# 2260 | TR 8:45am-12pm | Clark, Katharine | Online
Literatures in English I: Premodern Communities | How is the afterlife a social space for community negotiations in Dante’s Divine Comedy? How does Chaucer represent communities on the move in The Canterbury Tales? Eschewing a contemporary concentration on individuality and the self, this course focuses on Medieval and Early Modern conceptions and misconceptions of community. We will examine some significant texts in the traditional Western European canon while also placing the centrality and authority of these texts in question. Each student will be asked to research and give a short presentation on a non-Western European approach to a community topic such as time, migration, or the afterlife.OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a core Lecture in the major/minor, or an elective or pre-1800 if req already complete.
ENGL-UA 114 - Literatures in English IV: Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures | Class# 2423 | TWR 1pm-3:10pm | Silcox, Nick | in-person
This course is an overview of English-language literatures starting at the turn of the 20th century and ending in the 21rst century. The course will trace emerging popular genres, including science fiction, horror, mystery, etc., and media forms during this period, including print, radio, film, television, and digital media. Additionally, the course will focus on the ways emerging minoritarian and marginalized voices and perspectives leverage popular genres and media forms to explore the socio-political and epistemic conditions of the period. We will trace these emerging forms in order to attend to the aesthetic movements during the period and matters such as globalization, global capitalism, empire and imperialism, as well as social movements and issues such as race, gender, class, environmental issues, and geopolitics. We will read texts as responses to the rapidity of cultural change under the pressure of the material circumstances of each century. The course will explore relationships between historical and material circumstances and literary production, form, and cultural themes. Students will be asked to read, watch, and experience a variety of texts and produce assignments that include an academic essay, a presentation, and a project. OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a core Lecture in the major/minor, or an elective if req already complete.
ENGL-UA 201 - Reading as a Writer | Class# 2409 | MW 11am-2:15pm | Pantoja, Timothy | in-person
Reading as a Writer: Black Auto-Fictions | This course will primarily explore how Black literature uses and improvises upon the idea of the "autobiographical" in fiction, essays, and theory. We will think about how genres of autobiography, memoir, roman a clef, lyric poems, interviews and theoretical essays that "write the self" solicit different modes of reading. To help us think about how Black writers rework the genre, we will look at theoretical texts on genre, subject-formation, and rhetoric. Our reflections on the "autobiographical" will enable us to explore how Black writers use literature to think about memory and recall, experience and expression, freedom and exposure. Our readings will look at "traditional" Black autobiographies from "ex-slave narratives" to sections from the autobiographies from writers of the Harlem Renaissance. This course will also examine how the essay, particularly when written in the first-person, exposes or conceals the self. Moreover, we will also consider how Black writers use autobiography through texts that employ the second-person ("you") as the primary subject. In addition to literary text, the course will also look at paintings, photographs, and possible film to see how these mediums revise our understanding of auto-fictions. The course will finally engage how auto-theory appears in the creative writings of current Black Studies scholars Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman. Other writers we may read are Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, James Weldon Johnson, and Toni Morrison. OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a required course in the Creative Writing Track of the major, or an elective if not on the CWT.
ENGL-UA 735 - Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Catching Feelings | Class# 2485 | TWR 4pm-6:10pm | Risinger, Corey | in-person
Fluttering hearts. Sarcastic laughs. Irritated groans. Whether it's in a social media update or over a coffee hour with friends, we are accustomed to analyzing our feelings every day. This critical theory course, Catching Feelings: Collecting Emotion and Experience, asks what happens when we explicitly center categories of emotion in the classroom. How can feelings -- how they are developed, overlooked, shared, and collected -- inform our syllabus and our broader study of literature? Throughout this six-week course, students will dive into the expanding field of affect theory. Part of a recent""turn" in critical theory, affect theorists study embodiment, sensory experience, and emotion. They consider how our responses shape and are shaped by the power structures and environments around us. Our syllabus will particularly focus on affect theory's engagement with gender and sexuality, racialization, desire, and bad feelings. Course authors might include: Sara Ahmed, Jose Esteban Munoz, Raymond Williams, Sianne Ngai, Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Xine Yao, and Cameron Awkward-Rich. OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a Critical Theory course in the major, or an elective if the req is already complete.
ENGL-UA 800 - Topics: Ethnic Studies and Its Literatures | Class# 5047 | TWR 11am-1:10pm | Romero, Mariana | in-person
What is ethnic literature and how did it come to represent the experiences and knowledges of various marginalized groups? What kinds of literary genres and styles have these communities turned to in order to express their responses to the ever-changing definitions of race and ethnicity? Ethnic studies emerged as a discipline during the 1960s and 1970s when populations of student bodies significantly diversified across US universities. This course will begin by situating ethnic studies in a historical context alongside activist efforts during this time which were centered around anti-imperial and anti-war causes, second-wave and women of color feminist movements, LGBTQ movements, and the civil rights movements of African American, Asian American, Latino/a/x, and Native American communities. We will investigate the emergence of ethnic studies as a discipline along with its literatures - both canonical and contemporary. With the above questions in mind, we will consider the subsequent canonization of ethnic literatures and the resulting tensions around multiculturalism and representation during the 1980s and 1990s following the institutionalization of ethnic studies. Our final objective in this course will be to investigate race and ethnicity as terms of study in and of themselves. Readings may include the writings of James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldua, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tommy Orange, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and more. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me for any questions or concerns regarding the course at mlr609@nyu.edu. OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as an elective in the major/minor.
Summer Session II (July 3rd - August 15th)
ENGL-UA 112 - Literatures in English II: Literatures of the British Isles and British Empire 1660-1900 | Class# 2261 | MTW 11:40am-1:50pm | McCurry, Margaret | in-person
This course offers an in-depth exploration of Sigmund Freud's concept of “the uncanny” as it manifests in British literature. The uncanny refers to that eerie feeling of something being both familiar yet foreign at the same time, leading to a sense of discomfort or eeriness. It often involves a confrontation with something repressed or hidden, particularly related to identity or past experiences. In literature, this concept is frequently portrayed through ghostly presences, spirits, and hauntological themes, providing a unique lens through which to examine narratives. In this survey course, students will explore a range of British literary works written during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. These texts will reveal how Gothic aestheticism, ghostly figures, spirits, and hauntological themes have been employed to shape narratives, reflect cultural beliefs, and delve into human psychology. The course will cover a broad spectrum of British literature, including contemporary scientific and political theories, to provide insights into how the uncanny reflects societal attitudes about death, the supernatural, and the unknown. OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a core Lecture in the major/minor, or an elective if req already complete.
ENGL-UA 113 - Literatures in English III: American Literatures to 1900 | Class # 2262 | MTW 2pm-4:10pm | Vanderburg, Colin | in-person
This is America | Beginning with Christopher Columbus' invasion of the Caribbean up to the late 19th century, this course will examine the evolving and contested category of ""American"" literature. Exploring themes and forms of early American writing as symbiotic with their contemporary historical and social contexts, we will pay close attention to how the "land of opportunity" was frequently imagined and created through violent processes of exclusion. Through critical readings across multiple genres (poetry, fiction, letters, religious and political texts, and autobiography), we will trace settler colonists' attempts to write the nation, setting them in conversation with responses from Native North American, African American, and immigrant literatures. We will continually ask how these texts created the conditions of possibility for our contemporary moment-especially with regard to questions of identity, difference and belonging. As one of the core survey courses for English majors, this course aims to introduce participants to a diverse range of writing that may be categorized as""American literature" and to develop reading and writing skills that will facilitate deep engagement with these texts. Students will be evaluated on written assignments (including both traditional and creative options), in-class participation and reading responses-all of which will be designed towards undertaking respectful, collaborative thinking with one's colleagues. The syllabus will also include field trips that help us ground ourselves more actively in course materials. Please do not hesitate to contact ad4549@nyu.edu if you have any questions or concerns. I look forward to learning with you this summer! OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a core Lecture in the major/minor, or an elective if req already complete.
ENGL-UA 252 - Topics: Apocalyptic Emotions | class# 5274 | TWR 2pm-4:10pm | Darisse, Adam | in-person
In our own moment of impending catastrophe in the face of climate change, which so many experience variously with rage, sadness, apathy, and dread, it may come as something of a shock that the apocalypse was not only a moment of joy desired by many early medieval Christians, but was in fact the only licit source of joy according to countless religious authorities. In this course we will explore the language of affect and emotion in early medieval English literature, paying close attention to the way that it inflects representations of creation and doomsday. As we do so, we will consider how the language of affect and emotion subtly constructs social categories of gender, race, and religion among communities of the living--and in turn the sinners and the saved of apocalyptic literature. The course will begin by reading the earliest English texts alongside key theological and philosophical texts to understand the relationship they articulate between affect and apocalypse in the early medieval period. We will read texts from a variety of genres including poetry, drama (in the form of dialogues), homilies, biblical paraphrase, saint's lives, letters, theological treaties, and more. In the second half of the course, we will engage with contemporary scholarship on medieval and modern theories of affect, the history of emotions, and ecology as we complicate our collective understanding of early medieval affect and apocalypse and perhaps attempt to understand what these texts reveal to us about our own moment. OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a pre-1800 course in the major, or an elective if req already complete. Also counts toward the Drama Lit major/minor under DRLIT-UA 175.
ENGL-UA 735 - Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Digital Identity and the Novel | class# 2539 | TWR 4:30pm-6:40pm | Healey, Ryan | Blended online/in-person
What does it mean when people say we live in a "digital" era? Some say "we all live in a simulation" as we use our phones to count our every step and anticipate what we want to buy and read next. There is today a lot of anxiety and fatigue around what was once optimistically called a "digital revolution" Part of this comes from the feeling that we have broken the "self" down into data. The classical "self" that began with the Enlightenment and the early novel seems to have transformed into miniscule data points, where a certain type of knowledge has been earned at the cost of feeling incomplete and unfamiliar to ourselves. "Digital life" draws our attention to the history of the novel, a form that many critics deem fundamental to the creation of the modern "self." How did novels create a feeling of wholeness? Were novels the original simulations, but simulations at a warmer, more familiar scale? Or, did novels anticipate the "computational self," with its creepy surveillance (point of view), self-conscious stylization, and constant description of qualities and behaviors? What separates novels from digital computation? What was the old model of the self? This course compares "genres of computation" with genres of imaginative fiction when considering the historical formation and dissolution of models of selfhood. Possible readings include Eliza Haywood's Fantomina (1725), Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817), Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten (1909), David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's Your Name Here (2008), and Benjamin Labatut's The MANIAC (2023). Supplementary material would include excerpts from critical literature on identity, subjectivity, the digital, and the "nondigital," like Alexander Galloway's Laruelle and Ada Lovelace's comments on Charles Babbage's "Sketch on the Analytical Machine" (1842). OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as a Critical Theory course in the major, or an elective if req already complete.
ENGL-UA 775 - Latina/o Literature5178 Summer 2024 1246 UAENGL ENGL-UA 775 ENGL-UA 775 1 Latina/o Literature Seminar TWR 2pm-4:10pm | Juarez, Miriam | in-person
Intro to Latinx Literature and Culture: Past, Present, and Futures | This course introduces students to the forms and aesthetics of Latinx literature and culture from the post-war era through the present. We will parse through a unique selection of fiction, poetry, plays, photography, and film alongside a variety of theoretical conversations from Chicanx/Latinx Studies, American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Queer and Feminist Studies to investigate the multifarious and at times contentious means by which Latinx literature and culture produces race, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, etc. The course will also attend to pointed themes that urgently define the 20th and 21st century, especially as they show up in the literary-artistic texts that we encounter. These larger topics can include migration and shifting borders, racialized geographies, feminist and queer world-building, neoliberalism and globalization, technology and surveillance, and more. OPEN TO ALL: If you need a permission code, fill this out: https://forms.gle/PtwLFLvs22AYYWEd9
*Counts as an elective in the major/minor.
Fall 2024
CORE MAJOR/MINOR COURSES
Introduction to the Study of Literature
ENGL-UA 101-001 | Feroli, Teresa | TR 3:30pm-4:45pm
ENGL-UA 101-002 | McDowell, Paula | W 11am-1:45pm
ENGL-UA 101-004 | TBA | TR 9:30am-10:45am
ENGL-UA 101-005 | TBA | MW 9:30am-10:45am
ENGL-UA 101-006 | TBA | TR 12:30pm-1:45pm
Prerequisite: completion of the College's expository writing requirement, or equivalent. Restricted to declared English majors and minors.
Gateway course to the major that introduces students to the demands and pleasures of university-level investigation of English literature. Develops the tools necessary for advanced criticism: close-reading skills, knowledge of generic conventions, mastery of critical terminology, and skill at a variety of modes of analysis, from the formal to the historical. Also emphasizes frequent writing. To take this course you must enroll in a recitation section which meets 3-4 times per semester on either Thursday evening or Friday morning.
Descriptions:
TBA
Literatures in English I: Medieval and Early Modern Literatures
ENGL-UA 111-001 | TBA | R 11:00-1:45PM
ENGL-UA 111-002 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 111-003 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 111-004 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 111-005 | RCT |
Description: This course surveys literature in English from the Old English epic Beowulf (ca. 700) to John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1674). Medieval readings besides Beowulf include “Caedmon’s Hymn", and "The Wanderer,” selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play. Early Modern readings include selections from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the poetry of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and others, the drama of Shakespeare, and selected poetry by Donne, Jonson, Lanyer, Wroth, Herbert, Philips, Marvell, Herrick, and Milton, among others, and ending with selections from Paradise Lost. The focus throughout will be on the close reading of the literary texts in their linguistic, historical, and cultural contexts.
Pre-reqs: Writing the Essay or its equivalent across NYU.
Literatures in English II: Literatures of the British Isles and British Empire, 1660-1900
ENGL-UA 112-001 | Regaignon, Dara | TR 11:00am-12:15pm
ENGL-UA 112-002 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 112-003 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 112-004 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 112-005 | RCT |
Description: Literature in English II, 1660 - 1900. This survey course introduces students to the study of literature in English from the British Isles and British Empire, from the Restoration through the close of the Victorian era. Our course will focus in particular on several overlapping areas of concern, including: the rise of the novel as a dominant cultural form; literary responses to the emergence of capitalist exploitation and to European imperialism; the centrality of sexuality, emotion, and other aspects of human subjectivity to aesthetic production; and the changing relationship between literature and scientific discourse (including philosophy, evolutionary theory, and social science). Possible texts include: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719); Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (1789); William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789); Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831); Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861); Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883); Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891); and Victoria Cross, Anna Lombard (1901).
Pre-reqs: Writing the Essay or its equivalent across NYU.
Literatures in English III: American Literatures to 1900
ENGL-UA 113-001 | Baker, Jennifer | MW 11:00am-12:15pm
ENGL-UA 113-002 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 113-003 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 113-004 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 113-005 | RCT |
Description: This course surveys the evolution of literary themes and forms from the European invasion and colonial settlements through the late nineteenth century. Exploring major works of early American writing in historical and social contexts, we will analyze encounters between European, Native American, and African cultures; the poetics of religious devotion and cosmopolitan enlightenment; the cultural politics of revolution and modern nationalism; responses to the expansion of capitalism and slavery; the spread of literacy and the expansion of print culture; the development of urban and regional literary cultures. Throughout this course, we will seek to place diverse texts in critical dialogue with each other, interpret changes in American literature over time, and test the resonance of historical writings for our contemporary moment. How do literary texts help us to think about questions of identity and difference that have shaped American culture? How might we situate the literature of what would eventually become the United States in relation to the development of literature more broadly? Students will learn to read American literature with attention both to history (the study of change over time) and to genre (poetry, fiction, letters, religious and political texts, and autobiography). Writing assignments, lectures, discussions, and exams will develop particular themes in the development of literary form and processes of cultural change. This course is one of the four required survey courses for English majors in the "Literatures in English" sequence, and as such our aims are both to introduce you to a body of writing often collected under the heading "American literature" and to practice and develop methods of literary study appropriate to that work.
Pre-reqs: Writing the Essay or its equivalent across NYU.
Literatures in English IV: Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures
ENGL-UA 114-001 | Waters, John | MW 12:30pm-1:45pm
ENGL-UA 114-002 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 114-003 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 114-004 | RCT |
ENGL-UA 114-005 | RCT |
Description: This course provides a review of English-language literary production as it expands and diversifies from 1900 onward. Attending to such matters as the emergence of transatlantic modernism, the growing influence of U.S. culture around the world, proliferating literary activity in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and the intensifying demographic complexity of the U.S. and Britain, the course considers the changing scope and significance of English-language writing within an increasingly globalized cultural field. The course will explore the parallels and contrasts among a variety of forms including literature, film, art, music, stressing the uneven developments of the period, with special attention paid to the tension between highbrow and popular forms. The course will read texts as both response to and symptom of the ongoing crises of modernity unleashed by urbanization, immigration, war, imperialism, revolution, shifts in gender roles, race relations, and class conflict. We will investigate the influence on literature and culture of patterns of migration and diasporic movement between the US, Britain and the Global South and examine the relationship between the metropolis and other spaces such as rural areas and underdeveloped regions, the suburbs, and colonial metropolises and territories, and wartime home fronts. We will consider writers’ claims to represent the dominant cultural response to their age as they confront radical transformations in literary representation, the rise of mass culture and advertising, and revolutionary changes in the technologies of mass communications like film, documentary, radio and popular music. The course consists of larger lecture classes and a required recitation. Readings may include the work of Joseph Conrad, W.E.B. Dubois, James Joyce, T.S, Eliot, Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes, Claude Mackay and Gwendolyn Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Mulk Raj Anand, George Orwell, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Kazuo Ishiguro, Phil Klay, Riverbend, Zadie Smith and Junot Diaz.
Pre-reqs: Writing the Essay or its equivalent across NYU.
CRITICAL THEORY COURSES
If you have already satisfied this requirement, these courses can count as electives.
Applicable Courses
ENGL-UA 712-001 | Major Texts in Critical Theory |Gajarawala, Toral | T 2:00pm-4:45pm
ENGL-UA 712-002 | Major Texts in Critical Theory || TR 12:30pm-1:45pm
ENGL-UA 735-001 | Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory | Trujillo, Simon | W 11am-1:45pm
Course Descriptions
TBA
PRE-1800 COURSES
If you have already satisfied this requirement, these courses can count as electives.
Applicable Courses
ENGL-UA 142 – Dante's Divine Comedy | Cornish, Alison | TR 9:30am-10:45am | also ITAL-UA 270-001
ENGL-UA 415 – Colloq: Shakespeare | Archer, John, M | M 2pm-4:45pm | Also DRLIT-UA 230-001
ENGL-UA 450 – Colloquium: Milton | Archer, John, M | W 11am-1:45pm
Course Descriptions
TBA
ELECTIVES
Applicable Courses
ENGL-UA 125 – History of Drama & Theater I | Crawford, Honey | T 2pm-4:45pm | also DRLIT-UA 110-001
ENGL-UA 180.001 – Writing New York | Waterman, Bryan & Patell, Cyrus | MW 2pm-3:15pm
180.002 RCT - R 3:30pm-4:45pm
180.003 RCT - R 4:55pm-6:10pm
ENGL-UA 240 – American Short Story | Hendin, Josephine | TR 11am-12:15pm
ENGL-UA 250 – 18th and 19th Century African American Lit | MW 9:30am-10:45am
ENGL-UA 252 – Topics:
001 Robinson, Benjamin | TR 3:30pm-4:45pm | also GERM-UA 202-001
002 Deer, Patrick, H., Klass, Perri | M 2pm-4:45pm | also MHUM-UA 101-001
003 Crawford, Honey | TR 9:30am-10:45am also | DRLIT-UA 255-001
004 Marchelli, Chiara | TR 2pm-3:15pm | I, the Author | also ITAL-UA 303-001
005 DeCoster, Esmé | TR 2pm-3:15pm | also ITAL-UA 177-002
006 Henig, Roni | TR 3:30pm-4:45pmSee HBRJD-UA 90-001
007 Mangalagiri, Adhira, Nanda | T 4:55pm-7:40pm | also COLIT-UA 141-001
008 Robinson, Benjamin | TR 3:30pm-4:45pm | also GERM-UA 202-001
ENGL-UA 625 – Colloquium | Waters, John | MW 9:30am-10:45am | also IRISH-UA 625-001
ENGL-UA 640 – Amer Fiction Since WWII | Hendin, Josephine | TR 2pm-3:15pm
ENGL-UA 761 – Topics in Irish Lit:
001 Sullivan, Kelly, E | TR 2pm-3:15pm | Irish Poetry After Yeats | also IRISH-UA 624-001
002 Waidler, Sarah | MW 2pm-3:15pm | Topics in Irish Lit: | also IRISH-UA 181-001
ENGL-UA 721 – History & Literatures of The South Asian Diaspora | Sandhu, Sukhdev, Singh | MW 8am-9:15am | also SCA-UA 313-001
ENGL-UA 800 – Topics:
001 | Adomako, Andrea | MW 9:30am-10:45am
002 | | TR 11am-12:15pm Medical Humanities
003 | | TR 3:30pm-4:45pm
004 | | MW 12:30pm-1:45pm
005 | Freedgood, Elaine | MW 11am-12:15pm | BLACK BRITAIN I
007 | | TR 9:30am-10:45am
Course Descriptions
ENGL-UA 126 – History of Drama & Theatre II | Crawford, Honey
This course examines global movements in dramatic literature and performance from the late 17th century into our contemporary moment with critical attention to the varied ways that theatre emerges across social and historic contexts. Students will study a range of dramatic traditions including but not limited to Peking Opera, French Neoclassical, German Classical, Japanese Noh, Russian Psychological Realism, Epic Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, Yoruba Opera, Theatre of the Oppressed, and Teatro Campesino, while considering their related methodologies and paradigms of theatre making. Rather than attempt to survey over three centuries of global theatre, we will attune our readings, discussions, and embodied exercises to three core concepts— realism, artifice, and transgression. This course will introduce students to elements of staging and script analysis as well as seminal figures in the theorization around theatre’s evolution, its aspirations, and social stakes. Ultimately, we are asking (or perhaps reminding ourselves of) why theatre exists and persists as an essential mode of human expression and congregation.
ENGL-UA 180 – Writing New York | Patell, Cyrus & Waterman, Bryan
How does the literary imagination shape urban experience, and vice versa? Is cosmopolitanism an idea or a social effect ─ or somehow both? This course approaches such questions through a literary tour of New York City, primarily from 1898 to the present. Tracking the city’s emergence and continual reinvention as one of the country’s ─ and the world’s ─ premier sites of cultural production, we will examine a range of literary forms, including drama, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and song lyrics, contextualizing them through social history as well as other art forms such as film, music, and visual art. From Edith Wharton's look back at Old New York in Age of Innocence (1920) to Ling Ma's prescient anticipation of COVID-19 in her zombie satire Severance (2018), we will explore ways in which literature maps urban space and imagines the city's past, present, and future. Asking how urban social forms and experiences ─ neighborhood living, immigration, gentrification, etc. ─ give rise to literary performance, we will think through key scenes and events, from the development of Greenwich Village bohemia and the Harlem Renaissance to the countercultural "downtown scenes" of the Beats and punks to the visions of apocalypse and activist renewal that accompanied the AIDS crisis, racial injustice, immigration reform, and the political aftermath of 9/11.
ENGL-UA 252-005 City on Stage: Inventing New York | Waterman, Bryan
This course sits at the intersection of urban, theater, and cultural history. Focusing primarily on New York City, and drawing on a range of plays, novels, memoirs, and historical accounts, we will explore the trope of the city as a stage, representations of the city on stage, and the experience of street performance and spectacle across the nineteenth century. Topics include the emergence of celebrity actors, the politics of theater riots, and the development of venues targeting audiences along lines of race, class, or immigrant cultures. Along the way we will ask: What do urban life and stage acting have in common? Who is represented on stage and how? What are the cultural politics of street performance? How do traditional dramatic forms change over the course of the century? What new or syncretic forms--including minstrelsy, vaudeville, musicals, and museums--develop alongside racist and racialized performance styles and stock figures that would persist in American culture for decades? How did New York, over the course of the century, become the preeminent site of American theater culture?
ENGL-UA 252-006 Pandemics and Plagues
This course will focus on humanistic inquiry into health, disease, and medicine, by focusing on specific pandemics and infections: bubonic plague, tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, the 1918 influenza, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19. We will engage a rich array of materials and approaches by focusing on themes like historical plagues, plagues in literature, racialized and gendered responses to pandemics, war and pandemics, trauma and recovery, theatrical, film, and visual representations, philosophy and ethics, archives, and memory.
ENGL-UA 252-007 20th C Black Playwrights | Edwards, Paul
This course offers an in-depth exploration of the significant contributions of Black playwrights to American and global theater during the twentieth century. Students will engage with a diverse selection of plays that reflect the social, political, cultural, and artistic evolution of the Black experience. Students will expect to look across the African diaspora to examine the diversity of voices within Black theater, from African American to Afro-Caribbean, African diaspora, and beyond, and appreciate the intersectionality of identities and experiences. Throughout the course, students delve into the unique thematic concerns and artistic styles of influential Black playwrights. Some of the featured playwrights include Angelina Grimke, Lorraine Hansberry, Derek Wolcott, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, and many others. The course focuses on exploring the legacies of systemic racism, the political activism that significantly influenced twentieth-century social justice, the importance of feminist and queer playwrighting, and the influence of post-colonial thinking in theater.
ENGL-UA 252-008 Modern Chinese Fiction | Foley, Todd, William
ENGL-UA 621-001 – The Irish Renaissance | Waters, John
Covers the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, through the Easter Rising in 1916, and into the early years of national government in the 1930s. Readings in various genres (poetry, short story, novel, drama). Writers may include Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien.
ENGL-UA 724 – Italian-American Life in Literature | Hendin, Josephine
Italian American writers have expressed their heritage and their engagement in American life in vivid fiction or poetry which reflects their changing status and concerns. From narratives of immigration to current work by "assimilated" writers, the course explores the depiction of Italian American identity. Readings both track and contribute to the course of American writing from realism, through beat generation writing and current, innovative forms. Challenging stereotypes, the course explores the changing family relationships, sexual mores, and political and social concerns evident in fiction, poetry and selected film and television representations. Situating the field of Italian American Studies in the context of contemporary ethnic studies, this course highlights its contribution to American literature.
ENGL-UA 761-001 Irish Women Writers | Sullivan, Kelly
From Sally Rooney to Anna Burns to Tana French, Irish women writers populate bestseller lists today. Yet the history of Irish women’s writing from the early nineteenth century to the present is more often one of occlusion. The 2016 #waking the feminists campaign against the absence of women playwrights at the Abbey Theatre in its 1916 Rising centenary programming is just one recent example. This class historicizes and responds to these absences by foregrounding a tradition of women’s writing, one responsive to general trends in Irish literature, culture, history, and social and political movements. We focus on writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries after beginning with Maria Edgeworth’s novel Castle Rackrent (1800). We will consider poetry, plays, short fiction, non-fiction, novels, film and television: from Eavan Boland to Derry Girls, via Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, and Maeve Brennan. To complicate and challenge our own views of these texts, we will read academic scholarship, including postcolonial theory, Irish feminist theory, and other relevant literary and cultural criticism.
ENGL-UA 761-002 Contemporary Irish Writing | Waters, John
We will survey the remarkable literary production of modern Ireland, seeking to place the phenomenon of Irish writing in contemporary Irish and world literary history. What are the features of Irish writing in the wake of what has been called the Second Irish Renaissance? What have been the concerns of Irish writers in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement? How have the legacies and endowments of Irish rural life, Irish economic stagnation, Irish emigration, and Irish resignation been represented in the wake of Irish prosperity and resurgent poverty? What do the different genres of Irish writing carry of the traditions forged in the 19th and 20th or earlier centuries? What remains of “Irishness” that is useful to Irish writers? We will explore these and related questions by reading the work of living Irish writers, primarily texts published since 2000. Along the way, we shall examine the concept of the contemporary and the meaning of identity in national, ethnic, economic and literary terms.
ENGL-UA 800-001 Unpopular Culture | Sandhu, Sukhdev
What is unpopular culture? Perhaps Rebecca Solnit has the answer. "What," she asks, "is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic and the eccentric?" This class is a celebration of hermits and outsiders and angry women, cackling fireraisers and bedsit dreamers, fan-dom and fundamentalism, dandies and DIY-ism. Spanning literature, music, experimental film, obscure television, performance art and pirate cultures, this class explores a wide range of bold and formally vagrant work that, in different ways, has been scorned, patronized, demonized, censored. With the help of guest artists and curators, we will discuss the importance of pretentiousness, of humour, of shadows, of the occult, of alternative schooling, of ghosts, of non-academic modes of learning.
ENGL-UA 800-002 Arthurian Legend | Waidler, Sarah
The legend of King Arthur has continued to fascinate audiences from the early medieval period until the modern day. But was there a real Arthur? How did his story begin and how did it grow? Why did he become such an iconic hero? This course will search for the roots of the legend of the famous king as a hero in medieval Wales and look at its development, plotting the many depictions of its main character from villain to tragic hero. We will also explore the origins of his companions, with particular emphasis on the origins of the wizard Merlin. From there, we will travel across the sea to Ireland and examine how the legend developed, to what extent it took on elements of Irish mythology and how the Celtic Arthur compared with that of the continental Romances. Students will be encouraged to investigate such elements as the legend’s interpretation of Christianity and the pagan past, the depiction of ‘magic’ and ‘miracles’ within the story and the role of gender in medieval writing. In assessing the creation of the Arthurian legend, this course will delve into medieval understandings of history, the construction of identity and the concept of the ‘hero’ in Celtic literature and give students a grounding in critical thinking and how to approach historical texts.
ENGL-UA 800-003 "This Book is Killer": Crime fiction and the creation of justice | Boswell, Suzanne
How does literature conceive of crime? Since its advent in the mid-19th century, the genre of crime fiction has risen to one of the most successful publishing genres of the 20th and the 21st century. But what attracts us about crime in literature? How does literature conceive of, and create criminals? How do detective narratives shape the criminal justice system, and the way our society polices and punishes its citizens? How does the portrayal of crime intersect with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? And at a time when society is rethinking the role of the police, prisons, and crime, how has crime literature evolved - if at all? In this class, we will examine how writers have grappled with crime throughout recent literary history by looking at the rich tradition of crime fiction, from locked room mysteries, to Sherlock Holmes, to true-crime podcasts, and abolitionist writings. Our goal is to discover how literature grapples with crime, why the genre is so enduringly popular, and how it affects real-world policy. Units may include Russian gulag novels, Ming-dynasty detective fiction, the crime fiction bestseller, the rise of true crime, piracy and censorship, and fiction by and about incarcerated peoples. Authors may include Angela Davis, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sister Souljah, Seishi Yokomizo, Agatha Christie, K'wan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael Nava, Sarah Marshall, and Bryan Stevenson.
ENGL-UA 800-004 "Queer American" | Edwards, Paul
What does it mean to have a sexual identity? How does the concept of sexuality change over time? How have people described their desires and expressed their erotic feeling? This course examines a range of American voices that engage in queer desire, identity, and conceptions of the family. Beginning with these questions, the course looks to canonical and non-canonical authors to explore a multitude of perspectives on sexuality. Although the regulation of gender and sexual behavior—and transgression of sex/gender norms—have been central to American culture from its founding, this course focuses on texts from the second half of the nineteenth century through the very contemporary. By addressing these concerns, students will come to their own questions of the texts that go beyond finding moments of heightened desire and sexual transgressions. How do moments of quiet contemplation or moments of camp, play, and protest become places for queerness? With help from queer theorists and social historians, we will pay close attention to how discourses shape queer expression, and how queer authors have shaped American culture. It will thus be important for us to interrogate not only the meaning of “American” and “queer” but what is likewise the consequence of labeling these texts as part of a canon. The course will end, then, with a reflection on what we missed, the potential pitfalls of interdisciplinarity, and the problems that might emerge from an (over)emphasis on sexuality in the practice of queer theory and analysis.
ENGL-UA 800-005 Feminisms, Theories, and Histories | Regaignon, Dara
ENGL-UA 800-006 The Surreal Revolution | Krimper, Michael
Can art and literature really change how we act and think? How we imagine and create the world? How we live our lives? Surrealism, one of the most influential avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, went so far as to declare that art and literature could revolutionize everyday life. In the hopes of liberating modern existence from technological and scientific domination, surrealist artists and writers sought to question some of the fundamental oppositions at the heart of Western civilization: imagination and reason, madness and control, freedom and work. They tapped into the unconscious and dreams, experimented with collective forms of making and living, and turned toward the city streets, ruins, and wastelands of history to excavate unheard possibilities for the chance of an altogether different future. Though Surrealism emerged in Paris during the 1920s, it drew at the outset from material culture, practices, and ways of life outside Europe, prior to shaping other radical artistic and social movements around the world. Our aim in this seminar will be to map the wider transatlantic context through which Surrealism developed at the intersection between literature, visual art, music, theory, religion, sexuality, politics, and anthropology, focusing on its multilinguistic networks in France before investigating some of its precursors, such as the Harlem Renaissance, and its later circulation across the Atlantic, especially in the Caribbean. We will examine in particular the relationship between the revolutionary claims of Surrealism and the antiracist and anticolonial poetics of Négritude, while paying attention to their many reverberations today.
ENGL-UA 800-009 The Third World Woman: Anatomy of a Figure | Thakkar, Sonali
This course examines the contested historical status and cultural significance of “the third world woman.” In the era of postwar decolonization, this figure seemed for a time to name a possible common horizon of historical experience and political formation among women of otherwise diverse backgrounds in the third world. Among its other uses, the figure of the third world woman helped to identify and name the ways that race, migration, and capitalism produced a third world within the first world, connecting feminists of color in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the industrialized world to feminists in the decolonizing and postcolonial world. As such, the figure of the third world woman suggested an opening for imagining relations of solidarity and shared struggle across national, political, sexual, racial, class, and cultural lines. During the same time period, the “third world woman” also increasingly came to name a site of political intervention and theoretical knowledge production for various liberal feminisms, human rights and humanitarian projects, and neoliberal institutions, some of them intent on “saving” the third world woman from the supposed pathologies of her culture or religion. Our goal in this class will be to try to reconstruct the cultural history of this contested figure, as we consider what kinds of transnational connections—for good and ill—the idea of the third world woman made possible.
ENGL-UA 800-010 Novels of Youth In and After Colonialism | Vargo, Greg
Novels of Youth In and After Colonialism - This seminar takes as its central topic the relationship between youth and empire. What does it mean to come of age in a world-system when the key decisions that shape your life might be made in far-off countries that you have never seen? And conversely, why have writers in societies that have recently achieved political independence been drawn to narrate that political transformation through the lens of stories about growing up? We will read a range of different texts and genres, including realist novels, modernist fiction and autobiographical narratives by formerly enslaved people. We will think together about the strengths and limits of these various forms, considering the ways that authors have attempted to reckon with the existential uncertainty of living in a global society. Likely readings will include Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease; Mulk Anand, Untouchable; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; and Indra Sinha, Animal’s People.
SENIOR SEMINARS
Applicable Courses & Descriptions
ENGL-UA 953 – McDowell, Paula, J | M 11am-1:45pm | Reading Jane Austen Reading
ENGL-UA 954 – Regaignon, Dara, R | TR 9:30am-10:45am | Writing Women's Rights in the 19thC British Empire
ENGL-UA 970 – Fleming, Juliet | T 2pm-4:45pm | Reading Psychoanalysis
ENGL-UA 973 – Hanson, Lenora | T 4:55pm-7:40pm | Public Humanities
ENGL-UA 975 – Sudhinaraset, Pacharee | W 11am-1:45pm | Refugee Studies
CREATIVE WRITING TRACK COURSES
Reading as a Writer
ENGL-UA 201-001 | McLane, Maureen | T 2-4:45pm
ENGL-UA 201-002 | Gajarawala, Toral | W 2pm-4:45pm
ENGL-UA 201-003 | Freedgood, Elaine | MW 12:30pm-1:45pm
Capstone Project
ENGL-UA 910 – Creative Writing Capstone Project
Section 001 | Noel, Urayoan
Section 002 | Augst, Tom
ENGL-UA 911 – Creative Writing Capstone Colloquium
Section 001 | Noel, Urayoan | R 12:30pm-2:30p
Section 002 | Augst, Tom | R 12:30pm-2:30p
APPLY HERE FOR THESE COURSES: https://forms.gle/RcWvQJ5EqLgnt8GR8
HONORS
Honors Thesis and Colloquium
ENGL-UA 925 – Senior Honors Thesis
ENGL-UA 926 – Senior Honors Colloquium | M 2pm-3:15pm
OTHER COURSES
Courses & Descriptions
ENGL-UA 981 – Internship
Application and info here. *Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min, only as credit to graduation
ENGL-UA 995 – Greene St. Review | TBA | M 4:55pm-6:10pm
In this two-credit course, students will serve as the editorial and production staff of The Greene Street Review, the English Department’s online publication of cultural criticism. The course will bridge the gap between English majors’ scholarly abilities (as close readers and cultural critics) and professional practices, as they learn about publishing and cultural journalism. In the first few weeks of the course, students will become familiar with the place, structure, and content of publications with similar goals to those of the GSR, such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books. For the remainder of the semester, students will become the editorial staff of the GSR. As such, they will be responsible for soliciting, selecting, and editing submissions, for publishing a new issue of the GSR on the digital site, and for promoting the magazine. Each student will work on editing at least one submission, with the aim of understanding and experiencing the stages of literary publishing: manuscript selection, developmental and line editing, author correspondence, proofreading, promotion, and digital publication. A rotating masthead will allow students to assume different responsibilities for each issue/semester.
*Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min, only as credit to graduation
ENGL-UA 998 – Independent Study
Application and info here. *Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min, only as credit to graduation
ENGL-UA 999 – Mentoring Program Course
Mentorship Program ENGL-UA 999 is a no-credit, non-graded, class. Please consider enrolling! It will be used as a logistical tool to help pair everyone enrolled with a faculty member and mentor. You will also be invited to some events catered toward this program if you enroll. This is optional--you don't have to participate, but please do if you are interested, or think you may be interested later in the semester! Sections: 001. Freshmen, 002. Sophomores, 003. Juniors, 004. Seniors
MHUM-UA 102 – Pandemics and Plagues | M 2-4:45pm
Counts toward the Medical Humanities Minor. This course will focus on humanistic inquiry into health, disease, and medicine, by focusing on specific pandemics and infections: bubonic plague, tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, the 1918 influenza, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19. We will engage a rich array of materials and approaches by focusing on themes like historical plagues, plagues in literature, racialized and gendered responses to pandemics, war and pandemics, trauma and recovery, theatrical, film, and visual representations, philosophy and ethics, archives, and memory.
COURSES OPEN TO NON-MAJORS/MINORS
Courses & Descriptions
Coming soon!