Global Shakespeare
AS.060.132 (11)

In this course, we explore Shakespeare and his enduring global legacy. Working on one play a week, we first read the text, then engage with a staging, film version, or literary adaptation that places the play in a new setting and context. Shakespeare's influence is felt through a Soviet King Lear, Japanese Macbeth, and an Indian Comedy of Errors, showing how from post-colonialism to science fiction, Shakespeare is used and transformed around the world.

• Credits: 4.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Race and Pop-Culture in America
AS.060.131 (21)

How does American pop-culture deal with race? Through primary sources like Fresh Off the Boat and Jane the Virgin, comic books like Ms. Marvel, and books like The Hate U Give and Crazy Rich Asians, and their filmic adaptations, we examine and question how race is represented and used in recent popular media. Short secondary sources supplement our thinking and provide background to vital pieces of our culture often overlooked under the label of entertainment.

• Credits: 4.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Teaching Practicum
AS.060.801 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level:
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Science of Science Fiction: Experiments in 20th Century Literature
AS.060.134 (11)

Faster-than-light travel, non-linear alien languages, cloning, nanotechnology, and the colonization of outer space: this course introduces students to science fiction as a literature of ideas. We will sample short stories, novels, and films that use principles in physics, anthropology, and other disciplines to imagine future worlds and the human beings who inhabit them. Along the way, we will consider the history of the genre and the wider social significance of technology, literary form, and human imagination.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 30/30
• PosTag(s): n/a

Mini-Term: Virginia Woolf and the Everyday
AS.060.102 (71)

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small." Virginia Woolf's fiction, in re-centering the novel on lived experience, presents an innovative and experimental challenge to the conventions of Victorian fiction. Alongside an attention to Woolf's literary technique, our course will examine how her novels' focus on the ordinary and the everyday connects the politics of the domestic and non-heroic to deep and serious questions of human existence.

• Credits: 1.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/16
• PosTag(s): n/a

Introduction to Literary Study
AS.060.107 (02)

This course serves as an introduction to the basic methods of and critical approaches to the study of literature. Some sections may have further individual topic descriptions; please check in SIS when searching for courses.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 3/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Introduction to Literary Study
AS.060.107 (01)

This course serves as an introduction to the basic methods of and critical approaches to the study of literature. Some sections may have further individual topic descriptions; please check in SIS when searching for courses.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 12/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Classics Research Lab: The Symonds Project
AS.040.420 (01)

This course gives participants a unique opportunity to engage directly in empirical research and its interpretation and dissemination. Topics vary. This semester’s offering is organized around a project to reconstruct digitally the library of the nineteenth-century writer John Addington Symonds, author of one of the first studies of ancient sexuality. No prerequisites, but potential students should contact instructor for permission to enroll.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 6/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (01)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (02)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (03)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (04)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (05)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (06)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Freshman Seminar: How Not to Be Afraid of Poetry
AS.060.111 (01)

What is poetry? And why don’t we like it? This course will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary, into shapes and sounds so that sometimes we find it difficult to understand and sometimes we find it gives us great delight. This seminar will open up a range of poetry written in English, including some of the greatest writers of the English language. This course is designed for the students without a strong background in reading poetry but who have the desire to gain it; the main emphasis is exploration of the world and words of poetry and developing an appreciation and analytical understanding of the ways poetry can express, advocate, record, and move. Assignments will include reading poems, becoming an expert about a single poet, attending public poetry readings, creating poems, and writing short weekly assignments about poems. You will be expected to be an active member in classroom discussion and activities. Pre 1800 course.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (07)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (08)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

English Literature from Beowulf to Milton
AS.060.208 (01)

British Literature I is a survey of English writing on the isle of Britain from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries. It traces the formal experimentation in poetry and prose, and in narrative, lyric, and drama, through which that writing eventually became pre-eminent in Britain. It will also attend to the social and cultural circumstances—in the court, in church, and in the evolving public and private spheres—that shaped the many genres that emerged in this rich 1000 years and developed a definition of ‘literature’ itself . Author’s read include Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Donne Herbert, Marvel, and Milton. Through lectures, class discussion, written responses, and longer essay assignments, students will master the fundamentals of English literary history as well as the techniques of critical reading and writing.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800, ENGL-LEC

English Literature from Beowulf to Milton
AS.060.208 (02)

British Literature I is a survey of English writing on the isle of Britain from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries. It traces the formal experimentation in poetry and prose, and in narrative, lyric, and drama, through which that writing eventually became pre-eminent in Britain. It will also attend to the social and cultural circumstances—in the court, in church, and in the evolving public and private spheres—that shaped the many genres that emerged in this rich 1000 years and developed a definition of ‘literature’ itself . Author’s read include Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Donne Herbert, Marvel, and Milton. Through lectures, class discussion, written responses, and longer essay assignments, students will master the fundamentals of English literary history as well as the techniques of critical reading and writing.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800, ENGL-LEC

Zombies
AS.060.216 (02)

This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL, ENGL-LEC

Zombies
AS.060.216 (03)

This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL, ENGL-LEC

Doubles, Demons, and Dummies: The Literature of the Fantastic
AS.060.151 (01)

Talking reflections. Dolls with knives. Dancing automatons. They are all part of the strange and dangerous world of the fantastic. This course examines the literature of the fantastic, or what we can refer to as creepy double, demon, and dummy stories. We’ll look at everything from Poe to American Psycho in an attempt to figure out what just happened, why, and how it relates to literary meaning.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 16/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Zombies
AS.060.216 (01)

This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 2/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL, ENGL-LEC

Playing Together: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
AS.060.136 (01)

This introductory course aims to expose students to some of the most popular plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights, with an emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatrical production. The course challenges Bardolatrous tendencies in American criticism and education by underlining the influences of earlier works by other playwrights, though it also pays equal attention to the ways Shakespeare adapted, built upon, added to, removed from, and rearranged his sources. The course is structured around four pairings of plays, one by Shakespeare and an earlier play thought to be influential; to introduce some variety into this model, we also read a collaboration (Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen) and have a week devoted to secondary criticism on the early modern theatre, the theatre's material culture(s), and folio/editorial history. As part of their final project, students will work in small groups to select a pairing of plays from the syllabus and stage one scene from each play, drawing out similarity while also highlighting difference and re-creation.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (14)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (16)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (15)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (12)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (11)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (10)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (09)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (24)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (23)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (18)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (13)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

American Nightmares: Burroughs, Highsmith, Dick
AS.060.135 (01)

These three authors share a common starting point: Patricia Highsmith, William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick all began their careers writing mass market genre fiction in pre-Stonewall, pre-civil rights, Cold War 1950s America. Absorbing the stylistic codes of their respective marketplaces of suspense writing and lesbian romance, "drug fiend" confessional, and science fiction, each writer's conformist apprenticeship in pulp resurfaces in increasingly nightmarish forms in the violent and paranoid scenarios that dominate their mature work. Reading broadly in each author's short fiction, novels, and prose, we will sequentially examine Burroughs' "cut-up" techniques and "routines", Highsmith's free indirect discourse gone wrong, and Dick's disorienting temporal experiments as inflamed allergic reactions to generic codes. We will also examine the cinematic afterlives of these authors by looking at key scenes from three adaptations of their work: Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), and Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006).

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/19
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (20)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (21)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (25)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (22)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (19)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Expository Writing
AS.060.113 (17)

“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around three major essay assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections of “Expos” will most interest you. “Expos” courses are available to freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and to seniors by special permission.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Icons of Feminism
AS.060.320 (01)

This course looks at four crucial figures who have haunted feminist thought and responses to feminism over the centuries. Sappho, known as the first female poet, remains an enigmatic icon of feminine desire and creativity; Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus and the heroine of Sophocles’s play Antigone, still inspires feminist analyses of women’s relationship to law, the state and civil society; and Joan of Arc, the militant maid of Orleans, troubles thinking about women and violence as well as women, religion and spirituality. The last figure is Mary Wollstonecraft, often cited as the first modern feminist. The course will examine literary works written about these iconic figures, as well as contemporary feminist writing about their influence and viability as models for the future of feminism.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/13
• PosTag(s): n/a

American Literature, 1865 to today
AS.060.222 (01)

This course is a survey of major developments in American poetry and narrative fiction from the end of the Civil War to the present day. Authors to be covered may include Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Henry James, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

Literature of the Everyday
AS.300.429 (01)

The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this course, we will read closely a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Eliot, Zola, Tolstoy, and Woolf from the period between 1850 and 1950 in which the development of realism reaches it climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Malcolm and Martin: An Introduction to the Lives and Thought of Two Icons of the Black Freedom Struggle
AS.060.328 (01)

Using their recorded speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/18
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

Dante Visits the Afterlife: The Divine Comedy
AS.214.479 (01)

Dante’s Divina commedia is the greatest long poem of the Middle Ages; some say the greatest poem of all time. We will study the Commedia critically to find: (1) What it reveals about the worldview of late-medieval Europe; (2) how it works as poetry; (3) its relation to the intellectual cultures of pagan antiquity and Latin (Catholic) Christianity; (4) its presentation of political and social issues; (5) its influence on intellectual history, in Italy and elsewhere; (6) the challenges it presents to modern readers and translators; (7) what it reveals about Dante’s understanding of cosmology, world history and culture. We will read and discuss the Commedia in English, but students will be expected to familiarize themselves with key Italian terms and concepts. Students taking section 02 (for 4 credits) will spend an additional hour working in Italian at a time to be mutually decided upon by students and professor.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/13
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

Representing Otherness in Literature and Film
AS.211.325 (01)

The term 'Otherness' is known to be rooted in the Self-Other opposition as it emerged in German Idealism, adopted by psychoanalysis and transformed to Post-Colonial and Feminist theories. This theoretical framework will allow us to explore the role of the Other in literature and cinema. Students will become familiar with the historical development of the notion of the “stranger” through reading and analyzing various contemporary works of prose, poetry and cinema from various countries. We will analyze the ways in which these works depict Otherness and will investigate questions regarding their social, political and philosophical framework as well as the literary and cinematographic devices they employ. The course will have a comparative nature with the aim of learning more about the differences between the literary and cinematic representations.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): GRLL-ENGL

Biography, Black history and the Recreation of Early 20th Century Baltimore Neighborhoods: The Case of Billie Holiday
AS.100.440 (01)

This is an archival, original research course using the tools of microhistory and biography to etch a 1920s social history of the city centered on two corridors, East Baltimore’s Dallas Street and West Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue. Our evidence consists primarily of block-level maps, the census, newspaper articles, property records and city directories. Permission of instructor strongly recommended.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/12
• PosTag(s): HIST-US

Introduction to Disability Studies
AS.060.319 (01)

Disability has historically occupied a very narrow place in our cultural imaginations. In modern times, disability is almost always considered a medical issue. Yet, seemingly able-bodied, normal observers often exhibit a wide range of reactions when they encounter a disabled body. What would happen, therefore, if we shifted our focus away from the medical and toward these aesthetic and affective reactions? What if we focused on the pity, fear, and horror that encountering disability engenders in a so-called normal person? What if we considered normalcy itself as something that is socially constructed? In pursuit of answers to these questions, this course introduces students to the field of disability studies. Through an investigation of how disability is represented across a wide range of different media, the course will challenge students to rethink what they may think they know about culture, embodiment, and the politics of medical categories. Readings for this course may include Cece Bell, Ken Kesey, Virginia Woolf, Jordan Scott, Carson McCullers, Nina Raine, Lennard J. Davis, Ellen Jean Samuels, Tobin Siebers, Anlor Davin, Robert McRuer, Mladen Dolar, Jasbir K. Puar, Melanie Yergeau, Marilyn Wann, and April Herndon.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

American Literature, 1865 to today
AS.060.222 (02)

This course is a survey of major developments in American poetry and narrative fiction from the end of the Civil War to the present day. Authors to be covered may include Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Henry James, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

The Scientific Imagination: Literature and Science in the Age of Romanticism
AS.060.303 (01)

For scholars of literature, music, and the visual arts, the years between 1780 and 1830 are known as the Romantic Era. For some historians of science this same period is known as “the second Scientific Revolution.” Alongside innovations in the arts, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed the formation, or radical transformation, of several fields of scientific inquiry: biology, chemistry, anthropology, botany, geology, and climatology among them. In this course we will examine how these changing fields shaped and influenced each other. How did new discoveries in the world of science inspire novelists and poets? And how did the work of novelists and poets, in turn, inspire scientists, shaping the questions they asked of the world? Key authors include Immanuel Kant, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/18
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

Introduction to Narrative Analysis
AS.300.341 (01)

Is storytelling part of human nature? Do myths and legends have a universal structure? What is the relationship between factual and fictional narratives? What role do narratives play in the construction of personal identities? As a bridge between experience and language, narrative informs the way we understand history, gender, politics, emotion, cognition and much more. This course will provide a systematic understanding of how narratives are composed, how they are experienced, and eventually, how they evolve. The first part of the course focuses on ancient and modern approaches to the formal study of narrative elements such as genre, plot, character, narrator and reader. The second part of the course focuses on critical approaches to narrative, such as gender and narrative, social and political critique of narrative, postmodern perspectives on the representation of reality, forms of narrative in other arts and media, and conclude with the evolving concept of narrative in the digital age. Readings include works by Aristotle, Plato, Barthes, Genette, Todorov, Bakhtin, Butler, Derrida and others. Theoretical/analytical texts will be combined with practical exercises on literary and visual excerpts.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Freshman Seminar: Great Books at Hopkins
AS.360.133 (02)

Freshman Seminar: Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2018 include Homer, Boethius, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Mozart, Douglass, and Woolf.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Freshman Seminar: Great Books at Hopkins
AS.360.133 (01)

Freshman Seminar: Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2018 include Homer, Boethius, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Mozart, Douglass, and Woolf.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Holocaust in Film and Literature
AS.211.333 (01)

How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

Jane Austen Beyond England
AS.060.317 (01)

This will be an in-depth study of Austen’s novels with an emphasis on how they have traveled outside of the country of her birth – e.g. to the United States, India, and East Asia—through the work of individuals and the flows of global capitalism. Students will gain perhaps a disorienting sense of what Austen means in different cultures at different historical moments, and conduct individual research to learn more. Knowledge of another language is not necessary but could prove useful. The course will include a field-trip to the Alberta Burke Austen collection at Goucher College.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/13
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Poetics and Politics of Sex: Feminist Utopia in Theory and Fiction
AS.363.338 (01)

This course examines the historical development of feminist utopia in theory and fiction. Readings will center Indigenous, Black, postcolonial, diasporic, and transnational perspectives that engage the topic of feminist utopia.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/19
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Modernist Novel: Mann, Woolf, and Joyce
AS.300.319 (01)

In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/19
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literature of the Great Recession
AS.215.417 (01)

The Great Recession—sometimes called the financial crisis or the economic crisis of 2008—brought financial markets to a halt and created significant political turmoil across the North Atlantic. But its impact on culture, and literature especially, has often been ignored. This seminar will travel across Europe, from Dublin to Madrid, from London to Reykjavík in order to examine how literature has registered this most recent economic crisis. We will focus on how crisis is narrated and the ways in which literary works have managed to provide a voice for marginalized social, economic, and political demands.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/16
• PosTag(s): GRLL-ENGL, INST-ECON

Training\Writing\Consulting
AS.060.307 (01)

A one credit course for those undergrads who have been nominated as Writing Center tutors. Permission required.

• Credits: 1.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Sympathy and the Machine
AS.060.345 (01)

As millennials glued to their gadgets avoid eye contact with each other, and automated restaurants and stores do away with waiters and cashiers, the increasing presence of machines in the interstices of our daily lives looks also like the disappearance of the human from these interstices, nagging us. Is the so-called rise of the machine eroding human connection? This question is much older than we think. Scholars today are struggling to define a place for the human in the future landscape; this course looks to a corresponding moment in the past— nineteenth-century Britain, a world we associate with the Industrial Revolution. Victorian writers, trying to come to terms with an increasingly mechanized world, had to find new ways of articulating how machines were reshaping people’s lives, their sense of self, their ideas of love, personal growth, community, and social order. The three novels we will read for this course— Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss—were enmeshed in larger conversations and debates about the machine and the human. We will thus pair our readings of each novel with surrounding sociological, political, and critical discussions, in order to develop a richer understanding of what discursive issues these works were negotiating. A Dean's Teaching Fellowship Course.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Crime, Punishment, Felony and Freedom: Law and Society in Pre-Modern England
AS.100.373 (01)

Using legal texts as a window into English society, we will address the changing nature of royal power, trial by jury, treason, felony, and the freedoms enshrined in the Magna Carta.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/19
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE, INST-GLOBAL

A Century of Queer Literature
AS.060.310 (01)

This course is designed to offer a broad, non-exhaustive overview of queer literature written in the past hundred years. Although not every text on the syllabus was published in the U.S., the relation of these works to U.S. LGBTQ culture and politics will be our main interest. Individual weeks are designed to focus on particular facets of queer experience—how place (urban or rural), class stature (wealthy or working class), and race inform what is possible for queer individuals, relationships, and larger communities. Students will be encouraged to pursue their own larger critical questions around queer literary canon formation, but discussions will return to the question of how queer life and literature changes in the transition from the margins to the mainstream. What possibilities and what constrictions emerge as queerness seems to become more legible to larger numbers of people? Other routes of inquiry will address the varying ways these works address the relation between gender and sexuality, and whether there is such a thing as a cohesive queer narrative style or form. While our reading list primarily is composed of shorter works of fiction (usually <200 pages) by lesbian, gay, queer, and trans writers, the syllabus also includes memoir, drama, and poetry.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration
AS.060.311 (01)

The United States in 2018 held more than two million people behind bars, and each year it imprisons more people per capita than any other nation in the world. Understood in terms of “mass incarceration,” a “new Jim Crow,” or “carceral capitalism,” scholars and activists have come increasingly to characterize contemporary U.S. society in light of these facts. Despite this, there has been only sporadic attention within literary studies to the prison as a driving force in American literature, even as canonical works in world literature, from Antigone to Les Misérables to Native Son, feature prominent prison plots. This course in American literature aims to examine how writers, both within and beyond the walls of the prison, have responded to the shifting role of incarceration in the U.S. We will read examples of both “prison literature” and literature that thematizes the prison as an institution across the period of explosive growth in imprisoned populations in the U.S. We will ask what kinds of writing—what genres, moods, styles, and forms—emerge from experiences of incarceration and the literary history of its representation. And we will investigate how a focus on the history of the prison might reshape readings in American literature. Finally, we will consider the role of writing and reading in political struggles against racism, militarism, and heteropatriarchy in the U.S. By developing a critical account of the prison through the kaleidoscope of literature, we will look to develop tools to better understand a central feature of contemporary social life in the U.S. Authors covered may include: Chester Himes, Malcolm X, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Audre Lorde, Piper Kerman, Mohamedu Ould Slahi, and Colson Whitehead, among others.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dante Visits the Afterlife: The Divine Comedy
AS.214.479 (02)

Dante’s Divina commedia is the greatest long poem of the Middle Ages; some say the greatest poem of all time. We will study the Commedia critically to find: (1) What it reveals about the worldview of late-medieval Europe; (2) how it works as poetry; (3) its relation to the intellectual cultures of pagan antiquity and Latin (Catholic) Christianity; (4) its presentation of political and social issues; (5) its influence on intellectual history, in Italy and elsewhere; (6) the challenges it presents to modern readers and translators; (7) what it reveals about Dante’s understanding of cosmology, world history and culture. We will read and discuss the Commedia in English, but students will be expected to familiarize themselves with key Italian terms and concepts. Students taking section 02 (for 4 credits) will spend an additional hour working in Italian at a time to be mutually decided upon by students and professor.

• Credits: 4.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/6
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

The Contemporary Philosophical Novel
AS.300.309 (01)

What can literature offer to philosophical reflection? Can literature address experiences that evade theoretical philosophy? Or, does fictional writing conflict with rigorous philosophical inquiry? The long-standing separation of philosophy and literature begins when Plato bans poetry and tragedy from the ideal city in the Republic. This seminar focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers that challenge the predisposition against literature through different attempts to write the “philosophical novel.” In this seminar, we will take seriously the philosophical stakes of literary texts, and investigate how and why literature offers a unique perspective for philosophical reflection. We will read texts by Plato, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Iris Murdoch, and David Foster-Wallace.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Introduction to African American Studies
AS.362.111 (01)

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies, with attention to the literature, film, culture, history, and politics of black life in the United States. Our reading list will likely include texts by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and others.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Freshman Seminar: Great Books at Hopkins
AS.360.133 (03)

Freshman Seminar: Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2018 include Homer, Boethius, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Mozart, Douglass, and Woolf.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Freshman Seminar:Great Books at Hopkins
AS.360.133 (04)

Freshman Seminar: Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2018 include Homer, Boethius, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Mozart, Douglass, and Woolf.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Slavery in Renaissance Literature
AS.060.309 (01)

Against the backdrop of the rise of the European slave trade, how were slaves represented in early modern English literature? How was the condition of enslavement inflected by emergent nationalism, colonialism and theological constructions of difference? This course puts Renaissance literature into conversation with comparative histories of slavery and critical race theory. Authors include Aristotle, Terence, Epictetus, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Orlando Patterson, Kim Hall, Stephen Greenblatt, Mary Nyquist, Moses Finley and others.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/18
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

Class Fictions
AS.060.394 (01)

This seminar investigates one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century fiction: social and economic class. Why did raising oneself from humble beginnings, and falling into poverty, become such familiar stories? And why are they still so familiar today? We will look at how a number of writers approached the topic of class mobility, each with a unique blend of excitement and anxiety. Authors will likely include Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac (in translation), Charles Dickens, and William Dean Howells. In order to understand our topic better, we will also look at a selection of theoretical work on the nature of class.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literary Theory: The Hits
AS.060.404 (01)

This course looks at the history of twentieth-century literary theory through several “famous” texts. Movements covered will include formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, historicism, critical theory, cultural criticism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and Marxism.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): n/a