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English Courses

• ENGL S-36 The Bible in the Humanities and the Arts
• ENGL S-36z Utopia and Anti-Utopia
• ENGL S-88 Study Abroad in Venice, Italy: Interracial Literature
• ENGL S-124e Shakespeare
• ENGL S-136 Paradise Lost and Popular Culture
• ENGL S-141 The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self
• ENGL S-174 Tragedy: Ancient to Modern
• ENGL S-177v Study Abroad in Venice, Italy: American Literary Expatriates in Europe
• ENGL S-180 Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century American Poetry
• ENGL S-185 Wit and Humor
• ENGL S-191 The Short Story
• ENGL S-194j Adolescent Literature
• ENGL S-197 Twentieth-Century Literature: Modernism and Postmodernism
• ENGL S-198 Detective Fictions

ENGL S-36 The Bible in the Humanities and the Arts (32800)

The Bible is the fundamental document of western culture and the most widely disseminated book in the world, underlying the three monotheistic world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and informing all the arts in the west for the past 1,500 years. Familiarity with the main themes and stories of the Bible is fundamental to understanding much of American and world politics today. The course provides an introduction to the historical and anthropological contexts from which the biblical writings emerged and to the internal structure of the Bible, which William Blake called "the great code of art." Students learn the principle divisions of the Bible, its chief characters and stories, its vision of history, and its various ideas about sin, faith, salvation, uncleanness, the fall of kingdoms, and the end of the world. Approximately one half of the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611 is read. (4 credits)

ENGL S-36z Utopia and Anti-Utopia (31795)

This seminar explores the utopian ideal as embodied in literary, intellectual, and ideological texts that either project an image or offer reasoned conceptions of the perfect society. The ambiguous character of the utopian ideal, which holds out the promise of human fulfillment but has also been the source of great collective misery and human tragedy, is highlighted. The utopian ideal is thus considered in light of the contemporary mood of disillusionment with the idea of progress and the preoccupation with what has been called the "dilemma of modernity" in current philosophical debates—especially as these relate to the intellectual temper of the developed world and to the conditions of existence in the underdeveloped world. Members of the seminar focus on a selection of key texts that have influenced the development of modern consciousness; these include Plato's The Republic, Hesiod's "Works and Days," Thomas Moore's Utopia, Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, Voltaire's Candide, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Franz Kafka's The Trial, Eugene Zamiatin's We, Ionesco's Rhinoceros are read as manifestations of the ethical crisis of modernity, while Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood is examined for its articulation in contemporary terms of the dystopian vision that haunts the scientific imagination. (4 credits)

ENGL S-88 Study Abroad in Venice, Italy: Interracial Literature (32137)

See Study Abroad for more information.

ENGL S-124e Shakespeare (32729)

In this course, we consider five of Shakespeare's plays, one from each of his major dramatic genres: comedy, history, "problem play," tragedy, and romance, addressing them from a range of critical perspectives, including intensive close reading, contextual criticism, psychoanalytic and other theoretical approaches, gender studies, and stage performance. (4 credits)

ENGL S-136 Paradise Lost and Popular Culture (32667)

This course is an intensive study of Milton's Paradise Lost and its place in the popular imagination, from early spectacles and magic lantern shows to recent cinema, song, board games, and other commodifications. (4 credits)

ENGL S-141 The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self (32780)

This course is a study of major eighteenth-century autobiographical, fictional, and philosophical texts that explore the paradoxes of the modern self at a time when traditional religious and philosophical explanations were breaking down. Writers to be read include Mme. de Lafayette, Boswell, Voltaire, Gibbon, Diderot, Rousseau, Laclos, Franklin, and Blake. (4 credits)

ENGL S-174 Tragedy: Ancient to Modern (32441)

Tragedy presents failure and suffering as success and glory and presents good plans that end badly as admirable examples of the best human conduct. These paradoxes in the genre have occupied dramatists, theoreticians, and philosophers from its beginnings in ancient Athens, through the great flowering of English writing in Shakespeare's London, up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett, among others, transformed the ancient model of tragic suffering as the fate of guilty victims and innocent criminals. This course charts some of the large changes and continuities in the history of the form from the ancient to the modern stage. Background reading includes Aristotle's Poetics and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. (4 credits)

ENGL S-177v Study Abroad in Venice, Italy: American Literary Expatriates in Europe (32606)

See Study Abroad for more information.

ENGL S-180 Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century American Poetry (32352)

This course introduces the work of some of the most important American poets of the twentieth and twenty-first century. We engage in close readings and discussions of poems by Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Louise Glück, Franz Wright, and C.D. Wright. (4 credits)

ENGL S-185 Wit and Humor (32779)

Emphasizing wit and humor rather than "comedy" as classically understood, the course considers selected texts and films (for example, Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse, Dave Barry, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Monty Python) in the light of theoretical studies by psychologists, sociologists, and critics who have tried to explain why people laugh, want to laugh, and pay to be made to laugh. (4 credits)

ENGL S-191 The Short Story (32793)

The most economical of narrative forms, short stories provide unique insight into how literature works, since they do not have time to set up rules, only to put an original spin on them. They make you see something new. We look at some of the greatest writers of short fiction, most of them from the last century or so when the short story came into its own as a form. (4 credits)

ENGL S-194j Adolescent Literature (32255)

Adolescents are the most demanding readers of narrative. To them, story is everything. Understanding what makes adolescent literature successful helps answer the most elemental questions about storytelling. Reading writers like the Grimms, C.S. Lewis, Salinger, Cooper, Pratchett, Rowling, Pullman, and Mieville, we analyze what makes adolescent literature simultaneously deep, fun, and meaningful. (4 credits)

ENGL S-197 Twentieth-Century Literature: Modernism and Postmodernism (31715)

This course explores modernist and postmodernist texts. Authors may include Proust, Woolf, Beckett, Bernhard, Nabokov, Pynchon, Calvino, Sebald, and Saramago. These works are put in a variety of cultural, political, and literary contexts. (4 credits)

ENGL S-198 Detective Fictions (32833)

This course considers the detective story as a genre and its psychological and cultural structures. Readings include Oedipus the King, Hamlet, Poe, Conan Doyle, some of Freud's case studies, the classic English detective story of the twentieth century (Christie, Sayers, Innes, and others), paradigms of detection in historical and scientific writing, and contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to the investigative subject and the literature of suspicion. (4 credits)

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