Current Course Offerings

Click here to view a Google Spreadsheet with the following information, as well as what the courses count toward in the major. If you would like to reach out to a prof., please find their email addresses here.

Students may also count other courses listed to fulfill the Pre-1800/Critical Theories and Methods requirements as advanced electives if they have already satisfied those requirements with another course. Reading as a Writer may be taken as an elective by majors/minors not on the Creative Writing Track, pending space in the class.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:

ENGL-UA 101

What is literature? Why (and how) should we read it? What does literature do in or for our world? These are the questions we will begin to address in this intensive seminar. Over the course of the summer, we will explore major genres of writing (drama, poetry, narrative) as well as key historical movements and moments. As we read, we will ask questions about modes and practices of reading, writing, translating, and performance, paying close attention to how these practices change depending on their cultural, historical, or critical contexts. We will examine and further develop academic habits of critical reading and analytical writing while remaining attuned to the pleasures and difficulties of language and interpretation. Primary texts will include some of the oldest and most canonical works of literature in English as well as some of the most recent and popular. Depending on the shifting coronavirus situation, this course may also include guest speakers and/or field trips.  

ENGL-UA 111

Literatures in English I: This course offers an intensive introduction to the history of literature in English, from the oldest surviving texts in languages associated with cultural groups that settled Britain between the fifth and eleventh centuries to the literary works that sanctioned Britain’s unification and imperial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will read a selection of poetry and prose works from this period—including, ballads and epics by anonymous and major authors like Marie de France and John Milton; dramatic works by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare; and speculative fiction by Thomas More and Margaret Cavendish. We will examine selected texts and excerpts of longer works in relation to their historical and cultural contexts—paying particular attention to issues of class, gender, and race—that shaped the development of British literature and literary studies in later periods.

ENGL-UA 112

Literatures in English II: 1660-1900. An introduction to works of British literature drawn from poetry, prose, drama, and fiction from the Restoration to the end of the Nineteenth Century. We will consider how writers responded to conflicts and major changes in their society, and pay close attention to their discussions of genre, power, riot and revolution. Through class discussion and essay assignments, students will work to acquire knowledge of the fundamentals of literary history and of critical reading and writing.

ENGL-UA 113

In this course, we will study the literary history of colonial America and the United States  through 1900. We will consider how this writing was shaped by colonization, cross-cultural  encounters, religious practices, revolution and modern nationalism, slavery,  industrialization, westward expansion, civil war, and various philosophical and literary  movements including transcendentalism, sentimentalism, realism, regionalism, and  naturalism. The course aims to introduce some significant strands of aesthetic, political, and  social thought that have shaped and challenged the idea of a national literature in the  United States, providing the basis for further study in more specialized electives. We will  examine a body of writing often collected under the heading "US Literature" and also  practice and develop methods of literary study appropriate to that work. We will define  and question both of the central terms of the course ("American" and "Literature") and  situate the texts we read in relationship to other traditions of English literature. Students  will learn to read with attention both to history, to method, and to genre (poetry, fiction,  letters, periodical writing, political and religious tracts, and autobiography). Writing  assignments and exercises will reflect these commitments. 

ENGL-UA 114

An overview of English-language literary production as it expands and diversifies from 1900 onward. Includes topics such as international modernisms; literatures of imperialism, anti-colonialism and diaspora; race, ethnicity and representation; and the significance of English-language writing in an increasingly globalized cultural field.

ENGL-UA 201

Sounding Like One(1) Self: Reading as a Writer: “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself” - Miles Davis Often many come to poetry because it is seen as the quintessential form of “self expression.” But isthe self a given that need only be expressed? And is that self-expression an arrival or a continuous work, a succession of arrivals? If one has to work toward self-expression, then what is one expressing in the meantime? In this course we will explore reading and listening as a form of selfexpression as much as writing may be considered to be. We will explore how this work of “selfexpression” is understood and characterized by writers, with serious attention to their concern with sounding (like) oneself (or the opposite). We will probe how this process of self-expression involves others — those we read/listen to, how we read/listen to others, how we read/listen to ourselves. The course will take us through a wide range of reading and listening all geared toward helping us to understand these notions of “reading/listening” and its relation to the self-expression we encounter and we hope to manifest in poetry. We shall also explore, through readings and discussions, the notions that elaborate or challenge what we understand to be “poetry” “self” and, of course, its “expression.”

ENGL-UA 415

Shakespeare and the Human: What is the definition of the human? What impact do different ideas of the human have on society, everyday life and embodied experience? This course will put these questions into dialogue with Shakespeare’s drama. Its objective is that, as we learn more about Shakespeare’s plays and draw pleasure and inspiration from them, we unlearn, and perhaps re-envision, the idea of the human. During the six-week course we’ll pair six Shakespeare plays with different theoretical texts, maintaining complete openness and curiosity as to what emerges from these encounters. Our work will be supported and informed by a ground-breaking body of Shakespeare criticism informed by Black studies and critical race theory, Indigenous studies, queer theory, feminist theory, disability studies, trans studies, and ecological thought. Our approach to Shakespeare’s plays will be immersive, playful, and active. Each week we’ll practice many forms of reading (fast/slow/close/collective/creative), workshop scenes together, and study the plays in performance and adaptations. Our approach to theories of the human will be thoughtful and collaborative rather than masterful. We’ll practice summarising our understanding of complicated arguments, asking good questions, and staying with difficulty and uncertainty. Because we are all personally involved in the questions we are asking in this class, you will be encouraged to bring yourselves (your knowledge, experience, and creativity) into the scene with you at every stage. Ideally, we will reach a point where we feel emboldened to interpret Shakespeare’s plays creatively as we formulate our own answers to the questions we started out with. Example readings: The Tempest, Sylvia Wynter’s Black feminist radical humanism, Julius Caesar, Aristotle’s theory of the human, King Lear, Vine Deloria Jr.’s Indigenous philosophy of kinship, Titus Andronicus, Sylvia Federici’s Marxist Feminist analysis of the body.

ENGL-UA 735

Major Texts in Critical Theory: The Women’s Liberation Movement | The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) was spontaneous and iconoclastic. Its impulse and demands reached far beyond its estimated twenty thousand activists in the mid-1970s. Born in the expectant moment of reconstruction following the Second World War and channelling its zeitgeist - a determination to build a better world after fascism - it was also subject to the period’s divisions: complex legacies of war, empire, and migrations. The WLM is often credited with elevating the hyperlocal without devaluing the global. While the small group was its signature practice, most of those involved sought a grassroots movement grounded in everyday life. During this course, we will be dealing with some of its key critical texts from the literary academy (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray), its manifestation in public policy lobbying (Wages for Housework campaign) and in popular culture (Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, Carolee Schneemann). We will also, however, be putting it in constellation with other contemporaneous social justice movements, including anti-war activism, labor and solidarity organizations, civil rights, Black Power and the American Indian Movement (AIM). Too many female figures from these groups have not been given due consideration in mainstream studies of the WLM, among them anti-war activist Yuri Kochiyama, Black Panther party leader Erica Huggins, agricultural labor organizer Dolores Huerta, author and tenants’ rights campaigner Grace Lee Boggs, and AIM affiliated writer Leslie Marmon Silko. We will be placing literary texts in an expanded cultural field which includes readings of political speeches, correspondence between friends, community-organizing, family micropolitics and neighbourly collaboration, alongside “pornographic” video art, television adaptations, translation work, interactive public performance and journalistic writing. If designations like “craft” and “folk” have been used historically to denigrate female acts of creation, together we will re-read these methods as a provocation for the subversive, a gap for avant-gardism to emerge in plain sight.

ENGL-UA 800.001: Women Poets from 1960s to Present

How do we keep fighting for a better world and what role can poetry play in this fight? In this course, we will turn to works by women poets from the 1960s to the present to address the question of how poetry takes part in the struggle for gender equality, civil rights, and racial justice. How do poets engage with the social movements of their time, from the women’s movement, the civil rights movement and the peace movement to Occupy, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? We will read a rich array of canonical and unjustly neglected women poets to explore the relation between aesthetics and politics and trace the ways in which poetry might help instigate and sustain revolutionary praxis. This course will be an opportunity for us to engage with works like Gwendolyn Brooks’ Riot (1968), Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters (1971), the collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981), Karen Brodine’s Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking (1990), and Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction (2018), and to think about the relations between poetry and the revolutionary politics of feminism, socialism, anarchism. We will explore the ways in which poets engage with themes of uprising, work, activism, identity, sexuality, and with issues like the relation between gendered labor and other modes of capitalist exploitation, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation” (Cherríe Moraga), and the intersection of the “cruel fictions” of race and nationality (Wendy Trevino). We will think about the ways in which revolutionary politics and the insurgent energies of struggle shape poetical projects, informing decisions about how to publish and distribute them as well as formal properties like structure, diction, and tone. Alongside works by an array of women poets, we will seek to address the question of how to keep fighting for a future of social justice, and of how poetry might help us imagine radically different futures and move us to engagement in revolutionary struggles. This course will span the period from the 1960s to the present and engage with works by poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima, Karen Brodine, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Marilyn Chin, Claudia Rankine, and Wendy Trevino. In addition, students will have the opportunity to create their own poetry anthology and suggest poets whose work they would like to engage in the final week(s) of the term.

ENGL-UA 800.002: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

We'll explore the vast range of US poetry and poetics from 1900 to the present. The course will survey both movements and schools—Imagism, the New York School, Black Arts, the Nuyorican poets—and individual authors, from modernist innovators to leading contemporary poets. We'll read with an eye toward questions like: What's "American" about American poetry? What is a poetic avant-garde? How do a poem's formal features connect to its socio-historical setting? How have insurgent social movements changed not only US poetry, but the way we read it? Selected authors may include Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, and Susan Howe, among others. No deep knowledge of poetry required. The emphasis of this course will be on collective reading and class discussion.

DRLIT-UA 840: Playwriting Workshop

In this course, each student will write a new play. No prior playwriting experience is necessary.  The class will take a playful approach to writing for the stage: we will work towards making something new by experimenting with process and form and cultivating our ability to write things that surprise us. We will study the works of a diverse group of  playwrights and writers of performance texts in order to understand how plays work and to identify strategies we might want to take on and then renovate for our own purposes.  The coursework will include readings of plays and critical texts, writing assignments in class and out, and workshops of student writing, all of which are designed to help students write and refine a one-act play

THIS COURSE COUNTS TOWARD ONE OF YOUR WORKSHOP REQUIREMENTS IN THE ENGLISH MAJOR WITH CREATIVE WRITING TRACK.