Courses
Students can find and register for courses online at the Johns Hopkins Integrated Student Information System (ISIS), or they can go directly to English courses on ISIS.
Fall 2013 Course Descriptions
Jump to: Undergraduate English | Cross-Listed Undergraduate | Graduate English | Cross-Listed Graduate
UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH
060.100 (H,W) Intro Expository Writing-Staff (5 sections)
Offered only in the fall, this course is designed to help less experienced writers succeed with the demands of college writing. Students learn how to read and summarize texts, how to analyze texts, and how to organize their thinking in clearly written essays. Emphasis is on analysis and the skills that analysis depends upon. Freshmen only. (10 per section)
060.107.03 (H,W) Introduction to Literary Study-Hickman MW 1:30-2:45pm
This course provides a gateway to the theory and practice of literary study. We will consider fundamental theoretical questions such as: What counts as "literature"? What are plausible methods for studying this thing called "literature"? And we will set about experimenting with a range of methods for investigating literary texts in multiple genres. (Limit 20)
060.107.02 (H,W) Introduction to Literary Study-Nealon TTh 1:30-2:45pm
This course is designed to teach you some of the basics of literary analysis: how to think about the form, genre, context, history, and reception of literary writing. We’ll also work on your own skills as a writer. By the end of the course you should not only have a better sense of how to describe literary texts, but also and an improved ability to put your responses to literature in clear writing. Requirements: two 5-7 page papers, one at mid-semester, and another at the end of the term. (Limit 20)
060.113(H,W)- Expository Writing-Staff (23 sections)
This course teaches students the concepts and strategies of academic argument. Students learn to analyze and evaluate sources, to develop their thinking with evidence, and to use analysis to write clear and persuasive arguments. Each section focuses on its own intellectually stimulating topic or theme, but the central subject of all sections is using analysis to create arguments. No seniors. (15 per section) Please note: Each course has a different topic. To check individual course descriptions, go to the EWP web site: class="Hypertext"http://web.jhu.edu/ewp.
060.151 (H,W) American Literature, Race, and Civil Rights - Sundquist WF 12:00-1:15pm
The course will explore the role played by literature in advancing and reflecting upon the African American pursuit of freedom and civil rights over the course of the twentieth century, from the era of harsh segregation through the post-Civil Rights era. Although we will focus primarily on fiction, we will also consider essays, autobiography, and poetry. Writers to be considered, mostly black but some white, may include James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, William Melvin Kelley, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Paule Marshall. This class is for non-majors. (Limit 18)
060.211 (H) British Literature I - Daniel MW 11-11:50am
F 11-11:50am (sec)
What is British Literature? Beginning in the fourteenth century and concluding in the eighteenth century, this survey course examines the time period in which the notion of vernacular English literature, the corporate body of “Great Britain” as a national framework, and, with it, “British-ness” as an imaginary, synthetic identity, were all created. Participants will read a representative group of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”, Book I of Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”, the entirety of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” The course is designed as an introductory level lecture course and is open to all students curious about the beginnings of the English literary canon. It is recommended that students follow this course with its sequel, Professor Mao’s “British Literature II,” which will be offered the following semester. Pre-1800 course (Limit 60)
060.224 (H) The Modern Novel - Grener MW 10-10:50am
F 10-10:50am (sec)
This course covers the British novel from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on the decades around World War I. We’ll balance attention to formal innovations and experiments with consideration of social and historical context, exploring issues such as gender, empire, psychology, the city, and war. Our goal will be to understand what makes these novels “modern” and sets them apart from their predecessors; to this end, we’ll examine how many important authors also wrote extensively on the craft and aims of fiction. Readings will include representative selections by authors such as Henry James, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Ian McEwan. (Limit 40)
060.309 (H,W) Home and Wanderlust in Modernist Literature - Zhang
TTh 9-10:15am
In Four Quartets T. S. Eliot writes, “Home is where one starts from. As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / of dead and living.” Yet home often signifies constraints as well as comforts, just as adventure carries with it both delights and dangers. In response to the homogenizing and stifling forces of socioeconomic modernity, modernist writers exhibit a preoccupation with wanderlust’s promises of experiential novelty, vitality, and authenticity. Is it possible to be at home in the world? What are the possibilities and traps of the romance of wanderlust? Under what circumstances do local loyalties and cultural peculiarities clash or comply with more universal sympathies and values? In this course, we will address these questions and examine forms of wanderlust and how tensions between rootedness in one’s own culture and a cosmopolitan orientation bear upon the choices, behaviors, and experiences of individuals. We will explore how, in a variety of modernist works by Henry James, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, and Hualing Nieh, characters struggle between their desires for belonging and anchorage on the one hand and their aspirations towards infinity on the other. We will pay special attention to how social norms and cultural traditions with respect to gender and sexuality complicate the issues under discussion. Dean's Teaching Fellowship Course (Limit 18)
060.310 (H,W) Work and Worth in American Literature, 1845-Present - Tempesta TTh 9-10:15am
This course will engage contemporary discussions of economics, labor, and vocation with representations of people at work in the writings of Douglass, Melville, Hurston, Steinbeck, Frost, Yates, Springsteen, and others. Dean’s Teaching Fellowship Course (Limit 18)
060.317 (H,W) Time Well Wasted: Reading Fiction in the 18th Century - Maioli
MW 3-4:15pm
Is reading fiction just escapism? Or can novels speak to us about real life? We will discuss this question by reading classic works by Defoe, Swift, Fielding, and Sterne. Dean’s Teaching Fellowship Course. Pre 1800 course (Limit 18)
060.327 (H,W) Best Sellers in the Early Nineteenth Century: Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Jane Austen - Bujak MW 3-4:15pm
Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron were the best-selling authors of their day by a significant margin. In this course, we’ll attempt to come to terms with their unprecedented success, which was felt within the business of the publishing industry as much as it was in the minds of their fellow writers. Readings include Scott’s poems set in Scotland’s legendary past, Byron’s scandalous and heroic poems (including his masterpiece, Don Juan), as well as a novel by their less-popular contemporary, Jane Austen, whose formally elegant novels must be understood as drawing on and competing with the works of her age’s most dominant literary figures. Additionally, we’ll place a strong emphasis on understanding how the workings of the publishing industry affected not only the habits of reading, but also of writing, during this crucial period in literary history. Secondary readings will help to situate the authors and primary texts in their historical and literary context, and provide practical tools for literary analysis. Assignments will include reading quizzes, response papers, and three longer papers. Dean’s Teaching Fellowship Course (Limit 18)
060.328 (H,W) Restoration and 18th Century Literature- Kramnick
T 1:30-3:50pm
This course is a survey of the major authors and genres in English from 1660-1800. Topics include the rise of the novel, politics and satire, gender and women writers, landscape and ecological consciousness, philosophy, science and literature. Pre-requisite: 060.107 (Limit 18)
060.331 (H,W) Poetry and Perfect Worlds - Mao W 1:30-3:50pm
A seminar exploring poetic representations of ideal realms. Beginning with classical pastorals, we will move on to medieval and Renaissance arcadias, Romantic geographies, modernist utopias, and the ecopoetics and necropastoral of the twenty-first century. We will consider in detail what makes a place Edenic or utopian and how the fabrication of an imaginary world relates to the construction of a poetic text. Writers studied may include Theocritus, Virgil, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Lisa Robertson, and Juliana Spahr. (Limit 18)
060.345 (H,W) Mapping Victorian England- Grener W 2:30-4:50pm
The landscape of England changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth-century, from the unprecedented expansion of the British Empire and the rapid growth of cities and urban environments, to the increasing psychological investment in more confined spaces like the home. In this course, we’ll explore how Victorian literature “maps” these various spaces and, perhaps more importantly, the connections between them. The bulk of our reading will be novels by authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling, though we’ll also turn to poems, non-fiction prose, and short theoretical readings to enrich our understanding of how Victorian writers attempted to represent the spatial, social, and economic geography of their nation. In addition to examining the “horizontal” connections drawn by these novels—between, for example, the country and the city, the colonies and the capital, the home and the nation as a whole—we’ll also explore how these novelists draw on intellectual developments like the emerging Darwinian worldview and incorporate what we might call “vertical” mapping to understand how the past shapes the present. Throughout, we’ll pay careful attention to how these writers represent the specificity of place and investigate the influence of environment on character and personal development. (Limit 18)
060.347 (H,W) American Bibles - Hickman Th 1:30-3:50pm
This course will examine texts drawn from across the Americas—from Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana to Melville´s Moby-Dick to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) to Kushner´s Angels in America—that are fundamentally biblical in their inspirations, aspirations, proportions, and allusions. We will consider these texts’ attempts, in the face of globalizing and secularizing forces like Atlantic slavery and German higher criticism, to affirm, undermine, appropriate, and redirect the authority of the ur-canonical text. Prerequisite: ILS or lecture course in English department. (Limit 18)
CROSS-LISTED UNDERGRADUATE
German and Romance Languages and Literatures
211.201 (H) Case Studies: Law in Literature- Doreen Densky
MW 1:30-2:45pm
In law and literature, words and stories play a crucial role. Indeed, the courtroom is often inherently theatrical. What happens when legal trials and questions of law and justice are transformed into literature? What are the possibilities-and risks-of following the long tradition that combines the fields of law and literature as social and cultural forces? Why has this dynamic connection intrigued many writers of modern literature and how do they represent legal issues? This course explores the representation of law and trials in 19th and 20th century German-language literature as well as larger ethical concerns around justice and revenge. Following a theoretical overview, we will discuss drama and prose by, among others, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Kafka Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss-as well as selected stage and filmic adaptations of their works-as "case studies." (Taught in English)
Humanities Center
300.305 (H,W)Asian American Literature-Rhee TTh 10:30-11:45am
This course examines Asian American Literature with emphasis on East Asian American culture and history. Topics of discussion will include immigration, nation, conceptions of home, loyalty, navigation, and translation of various kinds. Throughout the course, we will explore how recognizable emotions, in tension with historical events, become manifest in art.
360.133 (H,W) Great Books at Hopkins-Patton TTh 10:30-11:45am
Great Books at Hopkins is designed for first-year students, and explores some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical tradition in Europe and the Americas. In lectures, panel sessions, small seminars, and multimedia presentations, professors from a variety of academic disciplines lead students in exploring authors across history. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course, as is a changing reading list that includes, for this fall, Homer, Plato, Dante, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Douglass, and Woolf, as well as musical compositions by Bach and Ravel.
GRADUATE ENGLISH
060.619 (H) The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespearean Temporalities - Daniel
Th 1-4pm
This course is designed to serve a double purpose: first, we shall read and analyze a substantial body of Shakespearean drama and poetry for its resources as a means for thinking about time, temporality, and historical change. Concurrently, we shall read and respond to debates in recent early modern literary scholarship about secularity, modernity and the problem of “presentism” as a critical orientation towards the past. If a previous critical generation enlisted Shakespeare into service as an exemplar of an incipient modernity based upon a tacit assumption of a secular bias, has that assumption been complicated by recent evidence and fresh readings? How might we rethink the relationship between religious discourse and academic periodization? In the process of answering these questions, it is hoped that a plurality of other Shakespeares- whether medieval, untimely, recusant Catholic, crypto-atheist, queer, anachronistic, or “presentist”- might emerge. In addition to Shakespeare, possible critical and secondary authors include Augustine, Henri Bergson, Johannes Fabian, Jan Kott, Madhavi Menon, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathleen Davis, Agnes Heller, Paul Kottman, Eric Mallin, Hugh Grady and Stanley Cavell. (Limit 8)
060.629 (H) Poetry and Poetics after The ‘Linguistic Turn’–Nealon W 1-4pm
This seminar will focus on novels from the period after the political upheavals of the 1960s: the period of This seminar will canvas a few of the many developments in english-language poetry, and in poetic theory, that have emerged since the heyday of post-structuralism, on the one hand, and "language"-driven poetry, on the other. The readings will include recent critical work by Joel Nickels, Ruth Jennison, Oren Izenberg, Maria Damon, and others; the poetry will be a combination of recent volumes by contemporary writers, and individual poems. (Limit 8)
060.651 (H) Form and Matter–Kramnick M 1-4pm
This course takes a look at revived interest in formalism and materialism in critical theory as it bears on the literature of the long eighteenth century: topics include formalism and close reading from the new criticism to the present, object oriented ontologies and eighteenth-century materialisms, cognitive criticism and phenomenology. (Limit 8)
060.673 (H) Migrant Modernism-Mao T 1-4pm
Responding to literary scholarship’s continuing concern with the exile, the refugee, the cosmopolitan, and the networks and flows of modernity, this seminar examines the migrant origins and later migrations of English-language modernism. Readings in Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Mike Gold, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, George Lamming and other writers will be complemented by relevant critical and theoretical texts. (Limit 8)
CROSS-LISTED GRADUATE
German and Romance Languages
AS.214.612 (H) The dichotomy 'prodesse'-'delectare' from Horace to the Twentieth Century-Forni
In this seminar we will examine a selection of literary reflections on and engagements with globalization and its mounting failures and burdens, as it has emerged in Europe and the Americas from the mid-twentieth century to the present. From the economic, constitutional, and cultural politics around the unification of Europe, to the ideological and imperial misfortunes of the U.S. after the collapse of the “End-of-History” thesis, to the resurgence of state populism in Latin America in the wake of neoliberal exhaustion, literary fiction has been deployed to posit, explore, and contest national and post-national myths of identity. The seminar will interrogate how this engagement functions both as aesthetic and theoretical discourse. Readings may include novels by Albert Camus, W. G. Sebald, Leonardo Sciascia, Orhan Pamuk, Javier Marías, Roberto Bolaño, and Jonathan Franzen, along with theoretical writings by Gianni Vattimo, Jürgen Habermas, Rodolphe Gasché, and others.
AS.214.633 (H) Boccaccio's Decameron-Forni
A close reading of Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece will allow the students to become acquainted with the civilization of the European Middle Ages. Among the areas of interest are: medieval Italy as a mosaic of powers, faith and religion, women in society, nobles, commoners and the rise of the middle class, the rituals of love, and the purposes of literature
AS.214.640 (H) Film Theory-Wegenstein
This class deals with film theory in its history and its current trends. We will examine structuralist, feminist, Marxist, psycho-analytic, Deleuzian, and other theoretical approaches to understanding and interpreting the cinematic medium. We will look at several different film samples from European film to Latin American Film, auteur-films to independent documentary collectives, animation films to blockbusters. We will invite at least one film theorist to class during the semester.
Past Course Information:
View the archive of course offerings since 2006.
Style DIV, please skip.
Style DIV, please skip.