Courses
To see a complete list of courses offered and their descriptions, visit the online course catalog.
The courses listed below are provided by Student Information Services (SIS). This listing provides a snapshot of immediately available courses within this department and may not be complete. Course registration information can be found at https://sis.jhu.edu/classes.
- AS.060.100 - Introduction to Expository Writing
Introduction to “Expos” is designed to introduce less experienced writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to recognize “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” as they learn to read and summarize academic essays, and then they apply the fundamental structure in academic essays of their own. Classes are small, no more than 10 students, and are organized around three major writing 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 “Intro” course teaches students to avoid plagiarism and document sources correctly. “Intro” courses do not specialize in a particular topic or theme and are available to freshmen only.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Kain, Patricia
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Middle Ages
“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
Instructor: Daniels, Nathan Adam
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Illness and Social Stigma
“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
Instructor: Lossada, Alexandra Maria
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.108 - Time Travel
Why is time travel such a consistent and perplexing theme in literature and film over the last 150 years? Why is modernity so concerned with peeking backwards or forwards? This course will examine the history of time-travel fiction, from its beginning in utopian fiction through its box-office dominance in the 1980s, and into today. Writers will likely include Mark Twain, Edward Bellamy, Harold Steele Mackay, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. Movies will include *The Terminator*, *Back to the Future*, and *Primer*.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.100 - Introduction to Expository Writing
Introduction to “Expos” is designed to introduce less experienced writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to recognize “The Fundamental Structure of Academic Argument” as they learn to read and summarize academic essays, and then they apply the fundamental structure in academic essays of their own. Classes are small, no more than 10 students, and are organized around three major writing 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 “Intro” course teaches students to avoid plagiarism and document sources correctly. “Intro” courses do not specialize in a particular topic or theme and are available to freshmen only.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Evans, William
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Justice
“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
Instructor: Kirmizidag, Nur
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Closed - AS.040.145 - Story and Argument from Homer to Petrarch
Stories entertain us, but we also tell them to make a point. This course will explore the ways that stories were used to make points by Greek and Latin authors from Homer to Petrarch, while also looking at, and comparing them to, the techniques of argument contemporaneous thinkers were developing. This is a course about narrative and rhetoric but also about how and in what way stories matter.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Romanticism, the Strange, and the Otherworldly
“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
Instructor: Childers, Joel Michael
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Medicine, East and West
“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
Instructor: Flowers, James
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.107 - Introduction to Literary Study
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
Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: What Is Love?
“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
Instructor: Koullas, Sandy Gillian
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: The Dark Side of Progress
“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
Instructor: Ross, Sarah Catherine
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Nature, Culture, and Climate Change
“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
Instructor: Doherty, Nathanael Joseph
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Age of Collapse?
“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
Instructor: Albert, Michael James
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.219 - American Literature to 1865
A survey course of American literature from contact to the Civil War.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Open - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Cli-Fi Climate Change Fiction
“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
Instructor: Westcott, Christopher John
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.203 - Bible as Literature
This course looks at the ways in which the Bible has and can be read as literature.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 3:10PM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Canceled - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Family Matters
“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
Instructor: Watters, Aliza
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Black Panther, Race, and Representaion
“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
Instructor: Makonnen, Atesede Retta
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.209 - The Literary History of the Devil to 1800
This course reads major works in European literature before 1800 (give or take) depicting the devil. It examines the history of the various social, cultural and political guises under which the devil appears, and the function that representing radical evil performs, in literature and society. Among our readings will be Dante’s Inferno; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Goethe’s Faust, Part One, and many other major Satanic works.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 3:10PM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Open - AS.060.120 - Realism Unsettled: The Colonial and Postcolonial Novel at Sea
A haloed claim about the realist novel is that it tells us stories that help make sense of the world— but is it possible to represent the complexity of social life under global capitalism? How do novels engage with the problem of knowledge posed by empire and colonization? We will look at writers from within the imperial metropolis as they struggle to imagine the totality of the geopolitical world, and also at writers from formerly colonized regions who “write back” to the imperial center, bending novelistic conventions along the way. The course starts by asking how new conventions and quirky techniques of novel-writing emerge when novelists try leaving the certainty of their national and regional boundaries to enter the confusion of uncharted territories. It then turns to postcolonial novels, to consider how these write against, or claim power through, the notion that their regions are chaotic and undecipherable. Primary texts: Moby Dick, Lord Jim, A Passage to India, Sea of Poppies, The White Tiger.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Kazmi, Samreen
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Open - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: The Ethics of Tourism
“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
Instructor: Streim, Alexander Michael
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Closed - AS.060.122 - Hollywood and the Culture Industry
For an average consumer in the first half of the twentieth century, American culture meant Hollywood, and “Hollywood” was something of an insult. Associated with mass produced spectacles of questionable artistic value, the American movie industry played a powerful role in defining “popular culture” as we understand it today. This course will examine how Hollywood contributed to the popularization of cultural production and consumption, and how Hollywood itself was constructed as a cultural icon. What are the myths and tropes that govern Hollywood? How does Hollywood transmit economic, social, national, gender, and racial ideologies? How did Hollywood, in the face of corporate hegemony, still manage to create some of the most enduring cultural artifacts of the twentieth century? The course will begin with readings by Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two authors who worked as screenwriters to support their aspirations as novelists. We will then turn to the crucial influence made by non-American writers on Hollywood, starting with Evelyn Waugh’s "The Loved One" about the “British Colony” Waugh discovered during a visit to Southern California. Two weeks will be spent on Frankfurt School theorists of popular culture Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and the final third of the course will focus on films. We will start by examining three filmmakers whose careers were defined by the “studio system,” the oligopoly that controlled American cinema during the so-called “classical era.” The course concludes with two weeks devoted to films about Hollywood by notable directors. Classes will be supplemented by relevant secondary scholarship.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Hoffmann, John
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: M 4:00PM - 6:20PM
Status: Open - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Family Matters
“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
Instructor: Watters, Aliza
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.209 - The Literary History of the Devil to 1800
This course reads major works in European literature before 1800 (give or take) depicting the devil. It examines the history of the various social, cultural and political guises under which the devil appears, and the function that representing radical evil performs, in literature and society. Among our readings will be Dante’s Inferno; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Goethe’s Faust, Part One, and many other major Satanic works.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 3:10PM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Open - AS.060.219 - American Literature to 1865
A survey course of American literature from contact to the Civil War.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Open - AS.060.203 - Bible as Literature
This course looks at the ways in which the Bible has and can be read as literature.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 3:10PM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Canceled - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Cli-Fi Climate Change Fiction
“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
Instructor: Westcott, Christopher John
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.307 - Training\Writing\Consulting
A one credit course for those undergrads who have been nominated as Writing Center tutors. Permission required.
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Sampson, John Robert
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: M 7:00PM - 8:50PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Comedy and Crossdressing
“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
Instructor: Best, Royce Lee
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.113 - Expository Writing: Democracy and Lies
“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
Instructor: Tutunji, Tarek
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Closed - AS.060.371 - Race and Space
Though we often think of the human fascination with the cosmos and the stars as universal and timeless, it has a history, including a literary one. This becomes especially vivid when we pay attention to the history of race. In this course we will explore the crucial role the cosmos and outer space have played in shaping understandings of emancipatory struggle, past and present.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Begg, Aaron Jared
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Open - AS.060.501 - Independent Study
Prerequisite: Six hours of English beyond the introductory courses, with grades of ‘A’ or ‘B’, and permission of instructor. Individual study projects proposed by a student to any member of the department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Nealon, Christopher
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.060.386 - Reading the American Swamp
The Shape of Water, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Swamp Thing – what is it about the terrain of swamplands that inspires us to dream up hybrid creatures that live within them? This course takes a long view of the American fearful fascination with these amphibious landscapes, from the 18th century to today. In the 19th century especially, swampy landscapes came to evoke anxious fear of revolt and rebellion among white slaveholders while as many as two thousand escaped slaves found shelter and sustenance in the swamp’s mazy topography. Who and what was lurking just beyond the swamp’s wall of vines and veil of mist? Though the swamp of the 20th and 21st centuries retains a sense of dreary, foreboding mystery, a relatively new ecological discourse on swamplands (now called “wetlands”) has emerged calling for protection of the strange and delicate balance of marsh life. The precarity of such ecosystems as the Florida Everglades comes to represent the toll two and a half centuries of environmental plunder has taken on the American landscape. At the same time, the 2016 presidential election saw the reemergence in American political rhetoric of calls to “drain the swamp” of the federal government. By turns, the swamp has represented growth and abundance, stagnation and decay, moral depravity, organic sanctuary, and has played the roles of both harbinger of devastation and safe-haven of the oppressed. At each twist, texts imagining swamplands give us a unique glimpse into the aesthetic, social, and political anxieties and struggles of the moment. This course aims to track these historical shifts and develop an understanding of precisely how and why they occur, all the while asking what it is about swamplands that attracts our deepest worries and our eeriest curiosities.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Dubay, Noelle Victoria
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: T 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Open - AS.060.501 - Independent Study
Prerequisite: Six hours of English beyond the introductory courses, with grades of ‘A’ or ‘B’, and permission of instructor. Individual study projects proposed by a student to any member of the department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Mao, Douglas, Staff
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.060.360 - Politics, History and Autobiography
This is an intensive seminar exploring the political and historical dimensions of personal experience. The class is designed to introduce students to writing critically about their own lives and to understanding the function of autobiographical writing in the lives of black Americans. We function partly as a writers’ workshop and partly as a critical review. The final goal of the seminar is a polished 15-20 page autobiographical essay and a 5-7 page critical review of an autobiography, such as would be found in the New York Review of Books.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Jackson, Lawrence P
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: T 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Open - AS.060.505 - Internship - English
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Staff
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Open - AS.060.405 - Psychoanalysis and Literature
In this course we will read some foundational texts by Sigmund Freud, and pair them with a select group of literary works--Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” and “Oedipus at Colonus”, William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, Wilhelm Jensen’s “Gradiva”—which have inspired psychoanalytic ideas and generations of psychoanalytic literary interpretation.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: M 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Open - AS.060.326 - Shakespeare: The Novel
What if King Lear had been a mother? What if the we thought about Othello through the lens of the holocaust? What if the indigene Caliban was the hero, not the villain? What if Miranda chose Caliban over her European suitor? (The Tempest) Could a modern-day Kate be tricked into marriage and “tamed” (The Taming of the Shrew)? When contemporary novelists rewrite Shakespeare, they pose questions left hanging in the play and bring the plays into our own world. In this course, we will read Shakespeare plays (King Lear, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice) along with contemporary novelists that rewrite – and confront -- those plays (Jane Smiley, Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, Anne Tyler). Students will take up important literary questions about kinds of literature (plays vs novels), the canon, imitation, adaptation, and also address the themes of power, gender and sexuality, family dynamics, authority, colonization and the environment.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: M 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.505 - Internship - English
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Mao, Douglas
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Open - AS.060.367 - The Fallen Woman in Victorian Literature and Culture
This course aims to trace how Victorian literature and culture created, negotiated, or even contested “the fallen woman,” the stereotype of a woman who transgressed the norms of appropriate sexual conduct. A fallen woman was a figure of illegitimacy: an adulteress, an unmarried mother, a seduced maiden, a prostitute, or even just a woman who didn’t meet the norms of gender and sexuality. Although such a phrase itself has disappeared today, we continue to see similar stereotypes of women in our own cultural imagination. By looking at a range of Victorian fiction, poems, and images, we will trace how representations of the fallen woman created, negotiated, or even contested stereotypes that were circulating around them. Students will read novels that address questions of gender and sexuality in Victorian discourse, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and George Moore’s Esther Waters. Shorter texts will include Gaskell’s short stories, and poems by Christina Rossetti, Augusta Wester, and Thomas Hardy.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Lee, Sung Mey
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: T 4:00PM - 6:20PM
Status: Open - AS.060.509 - Senior Essay
The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.8 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Open - AS.060.509 - Senior Essay
The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.8 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Open - AS.300.337 - The Tragic Tradition
This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In weekly lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Brecht, Pirandello, and Beckett.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
Status: Canceled - AS.300.219 - Freshman Seminar: Babblers, Mumblers & Howlers: Languages of Modernist Fiction: Freshman Seminar
Does literature represent reality or create it? Is language just a tool we use to communicate, or is it shaped by our culture, or indeed, is our culture—and even our own experiences—shaped by our language? Modernist writers at the turn of the 20th century grappled with these questions, concerned that literature and in fact language itself was ill-equipped to face the changes occurring at the beginning of a new era of modernity. From symbolist and sound poetry to innovations in stream of consciousness narration and non-syntactic fragmentation, the literature of the time reflected a receding faith in the ability for ordinary spoken language to communicate feeling, meaning, and the authentic self. The task of modernism in turn became the reinvention of a new literary language that could either capture this condition of crisis or seek to overcome it. This course will investigate the various responses and solutions to the crisis of language in Anglo-American and European modernist fiction. Authors to be studied: Virginia Woolf, Andrei Bely, Franz Kafka, Jean Toomer, Filippo Marinetti, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Olesha, et al. All readings will be in English.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Stein, Benjamin E
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 2:00PM - 3:15PM
Status: Open - AS.300.339 - Introduction to Comparative Literature
This course offers an introduction to the history, theory, and praxis of comparative literature. We will read texts from some of the founding figures of the discipline and look at the most recent debates in the field, including translation studies, literary theory, and world literature, among others. Particular attention will be given to the methodologies and problems of studying literatures in different linguistic traditions and the relation between literature and other areas of thought and culture, such as philosophy, art history, and psychoanalysis. Case studies in comparative approaches to literature will provide concrete examples to our discussions.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.211.480 - Religious Themes in Film and Literature
This course would be of interest to anyone who would like to learn about the intersection of religion and modern culture. At the center of the course will stand a close study of the representation of religious themes and their role in modern literature and cinema. The works which we will deal with are not considered religious and yet they include religious themes as part of their narrative, images, language or symbolic meaning. We will trace in various works from various countries and genre, themes such as: divine justice, providence, creation, revelation, the apocalypse, prophecy, sacrifice and religious devotion. We will also study the ways in which Biblical and New Testament stories and figures are represented in these works. 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
Instructor: Stahl, Neta
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.300.437 - Literature and Philosophy of the Everyday
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. Theoretical and philosophical texts on the everyday by Auerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lefebvre, Certeau, and Wittgenstein will accompany our discussions.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Closed - AS.215.406 - Novelist Intellectuals
What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Seguin, Becquer D
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.360.133 - Freshman Seminar: Great Books at Hopkins
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
Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Approval Required - AS.360.133 - Freshman Seminar: Great Books at Hopkins
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
Instructor: Egginton, William
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Approval Required - AS.362.305 - Black Periodical Studies
This course explores the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century black periodical culture fostered (and, at times, hampered) the literary and cultural production of the African diaspora. Authors will likely include Frederick Douglass, “Ethiop (William J. Wilson),” Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, and others.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.300.319 - The Modernist Novel: Mann, Woolf, and Joyce
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
Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: WF 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.100.326 - From Blood Feud to Black Death: European Society in the High Middle Ages, 1000-1400
Explores the development of society and institutions in the medieval west including kingship and law, religion and difference, gender and ideology. Looks closely at social responses to change and adversity.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Lester, Anne
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MWF 12:00PM - 12:50PM
Status: Open - AS.389.329 - Author/Canon/Archive
Why are some literary works from the past reprinted, anthologized, and considered worthy of study, but not others? Why are some works “lost” and some “rediscovered,” while others simply fall out of favor? Focusing on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary culture, we will use rare books and archival materials from JHU collections to examine Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston, along with a few authors you’ve never heard of, in terms of the relationship between authorship, stewardship, and status.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Dean, Gabrielle
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: T 4:00PM - 6:20PM
Status: Open - AS.300.337 - The Tragic Tradition
This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In weekly lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Brecht, Pirandello, and Beckett.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
Status: Open - AS.363.445 - Reading Judith Shakespeare: Women and Gender in Elizabethan England
If Shakespeare had a sister who went to London to be a writer, what would she write? Virginia Woolf’s account of the thwarted career of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Judith, in A Room of One’s Own frames our reading of plays and poetry by Shakespeare and contemporary women writers, including Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth. Working within a selected historical context, students will create fictional biographies of “Judith Shakespeare,” including her perspective on our identified authors and a sample or description of Judith’s own literary accomplishments. Secondary course readings will reflect contemporary economic, political, and religious contexts.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Patton, Elizabeth
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Canceled