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 paradigm of academic argument as they learn to read and summarize academic essays, and then they apply the paradigm 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: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Lossada, Alexandra Maria
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Doherty, Nathanael Joseph
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Open - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Flowers, James
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM
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 paradigm of academic argument as they learn to read and summarize academic essays, and then they apply the paradigm 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: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.114 - Expository Writing: Justice
“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply the paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Kirmizidag, Nur
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Open - AS.040.420 - Classics Research Lab: The Symonds Project
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
Instructor: Butler, Michael Shane
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Approval Required - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ross, Sarah Catherine
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Canceled - 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.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Miller, Andrew
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Approval Required - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Daniels, Nathan Adam
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Waitlist Only - 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.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Approval Required - AS.060.114 - Expository Writing:
“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply the paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Watters, Aliza
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Canceled - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Childers, Joel Michael
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Open - AS.060.155 - Expository Writing: Introduction to the Research Paper - Controversies in Adolescence
“Introduction to the Research Paper” is designed to introduce more experienced student writers to the fundamental skills of the research process. These include asking research questions, evaluating the usefulness of sources to answer them, synthesizing sources, reading sources critically, and developing arguments that deliver an original thesis. Students will work with a research librarian at the Eisenhower Library, with whom they will learn to navigate traditional databases as well as new media sources. The Research Paper is topic-based and divided into three linked units of instruction. The course culminates with a paper of 10-12 pages that draws upon the cumulative skills of the semester. Each course is capped at ten students and available only to those who have taken “Expository Writing” (060.113/114)
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Watters, Aliza
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Tutunji, Tarek
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.207 - Shakespeare
Reading the major comedies, histories and tragedies alongside the narrative poem “Venus and Adonis” and the sonnets, this survey course considers Shakespeare’s hybrid career as poet and playwright. Pre 1800 course.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 12:50PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
Status: Open - AS.060.114 - Expository Writing:
“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply the paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Staff
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
Status: Canceled - AS.060.114 - Expository Writing:
“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply the paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Watters, Aliza
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Canceled - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Streim, Alexander Michael
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.129 - Writing Africa Now
This course surveys post-2000 literary and cultural production from sub-Saharan Africa. Topics will include debates over genre and fiction’s relevance to African experience, legacies of canonical writing about independence, urban Africa as violent or “tragic” landscape, and problems of scale and geographical context. Readings by authors such as Adichie, Wainaina, Duiker, and Vladislavic, and students will be introduced to the main print and online arteries of African intellectual discussion. This class is for non-majors and does not count towards the English major or minor.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.060.210 - British Literature II
This course provides a framework for grasping the dazzling variety and explosive innovation of literature in English during the last quarter-millennium. Attending both to textual details and to historical contexts, we will see how Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde, Woolf, Rushdie, and other writers extend and undo tradition, illuminate their times and places as well as our own, and conspire to bring to us the intense experience distinctive to great literary art.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Open - AS.060.139 - Expository Writing: The Narrative Essay
Telling stories is one of the first and most important ways that human beings try to make sense of the world and their experience of it. The narrative art informs fiction and nonfiction alike, is central to the writing of history, anthropology, crime reports and laboratory reports, sports stories and political documentaries. What happened? The answer may be imagined or factual, but it will almost certainly be narrative. This course focuses on the narrative essay, a nonfiction prose form that answers the question of “what happened” in a variety of contexts and aims to make sense not only of what happened but how and why. We will begin by summarizing narrative essays, will move to analyzing them, and in the second half of the course you will write two narrative essays of your own, the first based on a choice of topics and sources, the second of your own design. Authors may include James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Chang Rae Lee, Danielle Ofri, George Orwell, Richard Rodriguez, Richard Selzer, and Abraham Verghese. You will learn the power of narrative to inform and persuade as you test that power in your own writing.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Kain, Patricia
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Best, Royce Lee
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.060.114 - Expository Writing:Violence and Macbeth
“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply the paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: O'Connor, Marie T
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.210 - British Literature II
This course provides a framework for grasping the dazzling variety and explosive innovation of literature in English during the last quarter-millennium. Attending both to textual details and to historical contexts, we will see how Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde, Woolf, Rushdie, and other writers extend and undo tradition, illuminate their times and places as well as our own, and conspire to bring to us the intense experience distinctive to great literary art.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Open - AS.060.207 - Shakespeare
Reading the major comedies, histories and tragedies alongside the narrative poem “Venus and Adonis” and the sonnets, this survey course considers Shakespeare’s hybrid career as poet and playwright. Pre 1800 course.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 12:50PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
Status: Open - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Albert, Michael James
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.114 - 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 paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Westcott, Christopher John
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.155 - Expository Writing: Introduction to the Research Paper - Controversies in Adolescence
“Introduction to the Research Paper” is designed to introduce more experienced student writers to the fundamental skills of the research process. These include asking research questions, evaluating the usefulness of sources to answer them, synthesizing sources, reading sources critically, and developing arguments that deliver an original thesis. Students will work with a research librarian at the Eisenhower Library, with whom they will learn to navigate traditional databases as well as new media sources. The Research Paper is topic-based and divided into three linked units of instruction. The course culminates with a paper of 10-12 pages that draws upon the cumulative skills of the semester. Each course is capped at ten students and available only to those who have taken “Expository Writing” (060.113/114)
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Watters, Aliza
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.114 - Expository Writing: Black Panther, Race, and Representation
“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply the paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Makonnen, Atesede Retta
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.114 - Expository Writing: Violence and Macbeth
“Expos” is designed to introduce more confident student writers to the elements of academic argument. Students learn to apply the paradigm of academic argument in academic essays of their own. Classes are capped at 15 students and organized around four 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 “Expos” course teaches students to document sources correctly and provides its own topic or theme to engage students’ writing and thinking. Please see the Expository Writing Program's website for 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 from the English Department.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: O'Connor, Marie T
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.060.342 - Contemporary Novel of Ideas
The novel of ideas is often traced to 18th century French or 19th century Russian writing, but it has come broadly to signify works of robust philosophical contemplation. The inherently slippery term seems to indicate a work in which “form” is subsidiary to “content,” or at least, in which narrative structures adapt to prioritize thought rather than style, image, or even character. But how, exactly, and about what, do novels “think?” In large part, the novel of ideas is now conflated with a rote and recognizable brand of social realism. This course asks what might qualify as a novel of ideas today, both in terms of the novel’s changing relation to geographical space (and thereby the formal spaces in which philosophy might lurk), and of the particular “ideas” it critiques or puts forth. We will read novelists including J.M. Coetzee, Marlene van Niekerk, Jonathan Franzen, Teju Cole, and Ronan Bennett within a longer literary-philosophical tradition, with reference to works such as Candide, War and Peace, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.060.323 - Mind, Body, and Materialist Science in Victorian Literature
What was the relationship between mind and body in Victorian discourses of science? In 1875, William B. Carpenter gave a lecture entitled “Is Man an Automaton?” claiming that the human mind was reducible to material processes that were independent of the higher faculty of the will. Prior to Carpenter, however, nineteenth-century thinkers had already been exploring the possibility of the material foundation of human existence. Was the mind an extension of the body? How could scientific theories explain unknown, hidden domains of the mind? How far could evolutionary science go to challenge the foundation of human existence by locating psychological phenomena in biological life and in physical adaptations to the material environment? To explore these questions, this course examines the discourses of the mind and body in the Victorian era that were shaped by both literary and scientific texts. Starting with the pseudo-scientific discourse of mesmerism, we will examine the growing interest in observing mental life through outward bodily signs. We will then investigate discourses surrounding mental illness, automatic behavior, the unconscious workings of memory, evolutionary and hereditary ideas, and the relationship between human and nonhuman organisms. As we read texts written by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner, we will explore how such scientific discourses challenged traditional notions of dualism, identity, agency, and ethics.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Lee, Sung Mey
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: T 4:00PM - 6:20PM
Status: Open - AS.060.327 - "All Art is Propaganda"
This course will explore black literature written as protest. We will examine how, in the face of threats to black life, Frances E.W. Harper, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, and others have realized versions of W.E.B. Du Bois’s objective: “all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.”
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.060.502 - Independent Study
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Staff
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.060.331 - The Literature of the Atlantic Slavery
This seminar will trace the historical development of the slavery debate in the Atlantic world through examination of key texts from a host of genres and locations—Quaker religious tracts, political documents like the Haitian Declaration of Independence, Cuban antislavery novels, slave narratives, and “classics” of American literature like Melville’s Benito Cereno. We will consider how the institution of Atlantic slavery was variously represented, justified, and criticized, discovering in the process the deep structures of modern slavery discourse.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.060.211 - How Not to be Afraid of Poetry
What is poetry? And why don't we like it? This course will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary. Opening up a range of poetry in English, the course will involve reading poetry aloud, thinking about poetry and its forms, and gaining experience in understanding poetry. Assignments will include attending to details small and large in poems, becoming an expert about a single poet, debating aesthetic issues, and composing short analytical papers about poems. There are two required written assignments, a midterm and a final examination.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.211 - How Not to be Afraid of Poetry
What is poetry? And why don't we like it? This course will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary. Opening up a range of poetry in English, the course will involve reading poetry aloud, thinking about poetry and its forms, and gaining experience in understanding poetry. Assignments will include attending to details small and large in poems, becoming an expert about a single poet, debating aesthetic issues, and composing short analytical papers about poems. There are two required written assignments, a midterm and a final examination.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
Status: Open - AS.060.388 - Old World/New World Women
The course considers the transatlantic writing of three women in the early modern period, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley. We will consider issues of identity, spatiality, religion, commerce, enforced labor, sexuality, race, and gender, along with literary tradition, formal analysis and poetics. We will read a good deal of these early women writers. Foremost in our mind will be the question of how perceptions of space and time are mediated through the global experiences of early modernity.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.060.402 - The Computer in Modern Literature
How have computers, and human interactions with computers, been represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature? How have attitudes toward computers changed over that time? Now most books are written on computers, and many are read on them as well: what traces of these forms of production and consumption can we find in literary texts?
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.060.502 - Independent Study
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Hickman, Jared W, Staff
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.213.328 - German Literary Modernism
Taught in English. German Literary Modernism focuses on modernist works of literature between 1900-1930, considering central modernist authors against the backdrop of dramatic changes and events in European culture and society, including urbanization, technological change, the First World War, and social and artistic movements. Students will engage literary works--by such authors as Kafka, Rilke, Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann--that express a sense of crisis about modern life, or provoke questions about the nature of reality, the human self, the reliability of perception, and the possibilities of language and art. Students have the option of an additional hour of German discussion and doing all the assignments in German for German-language credit (3+1) towards the major or minor. Students interested in that option should register for section 2.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.211.351 - Why Poetry Matters: Poets Between Lies and Truth in the English and Italian Renaissance
Does poetry participate in the quest for truth and knowledge? How does it compare to other such disciplines as history or philosophy? Are poets liars or do they have a deeper gaze on reality than anyone else? To answer these questions, this course studies poetry’s role within the different fields of human learning in the Renaissance. We will focus on the English and Italian tradition, reading texts by John Milton and Torquato Tasso, and explore the classical roots of the debate around poetry (Aristotle, Plato, Horace). We will then examine the relationship between science and literature through the work of Galileo Galilei. We will also study rare and ancient books in our library. The course is taught in English. All readings will be in English, but the original texts will also be available.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Brenna, Francesco
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.211.203 - Propaganda: From Blut und Boden to Post-Fact
This course taught by Writing Seminars professor Wayne Biddle and Media Studies professor Bernadette Wegenstein covers the 20th-century history of propaganda with special focus on its visual techniques, on censorship, and how media serve as sites of both control and resistance to power. We will pay particular attention to the influence of misinformation abetted by the new media revolution, and both the rise of the political rhetoric of “fake news” and the massive dissemination of actual fake news since the 2016 election. Students will write papers pegged to current issues and events using the critical framework developed in class. Cap 30 students. Reader: Jason Stanley: How Propaganda Works, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Wegenstein, Bernadette
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
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 3.6 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: Thompson, Mark C
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.363.331 - Gender and Sexuality beyond the Global West: Stitching Women-Sewing and Gender, Labor, and Art
What’s radical about stitching? And how did sewing coming to be viewed—across centuries, cultures, regions, and political epochs—as (in embroidery artist Hannah Hill’s words) “women’s work”? This course will analyze and discuss how work with needle and thread has been associated with women, their bodies, and the domestic space where the repetitive labor of mending, the mixed opportunity for making, and the devalued practice of the “applied arts” took place. Looking at histories of work, fictions, and visual objects, we will explore stitching’s gendered past and its potential for oppressive normativity and radical, creative expression alike. Over the semester, our course follows the “red thread” of stitching via four short response papers (or one Unessay), one in-class presentation, and one final oral history/research project on an inter-disciplinary discussion related to the (often radical) politics and poetics of women’s lives and works. Authors and artists may include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Carol Ann Duffy, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Elaine Reichek, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa dalla Costa, Kyung-Ah Ham, and Project Runway.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ross, Sarah Catherine
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.362.311 - Black Utopias
In this course, we will read literary and historical texts that present visions of black utopia. Authors include “Ethiop” (William J. Wilson), Marcus Garvey, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and others.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.213.328 - German Literary Modernism
Taught in English. German Literary Modernism focuses on modernist works of literature between 1900-1930, considering central modernist authors against the backdrop of dramatic changes and events in European culture and society, including urbanization, technological change, the First World War, and social and artistic movements. Students will engage literary works--by such authors as Kafka, Rilke, Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann--that express a sense of crisis about modern life, or provoke questions about the nature of reality, the human self, the reliability of perception, and the possibilities of language and art. Students have the option of an additional hour of German discussion and doing all the assignments in German for German-language credit (3+1) towards the major or minor. Students interested in that option should register for section 2.
Credits: 4.00
Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.211.477 - Witchcraft and Demonology in Literature and the Arts
Who were the witches? Why were they persecuted for hundreds of years? Why were women identified as the witches par excellence? How many witches were put to death between 1400 and 1800? What traits did European witch-mythologies share with other societies? After the witch-hunts ended, how did “The Witch” go from being “monstrous” to being “admirable” and even “sexy”? Answers are found in history and anthropology, but also in theology,literature, folklore, music, and the visual arts, including cinema.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Stephens, Walter E
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.215.290 - Latin American Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: From the 'World Upside Down' to the 'Coloniality of Power'
This course, taught in English, examines how indigenous and local (postcolonial) intellectuals in Latin America responded to the ideology and practices of Spanish Colonialism in the earliest post-conquest years (1532), continued to battle colonialism during the period of the wars of independence, and finally arrived at the production of an analysis that shows how modernity is but the other face of colonialism. Among key works to be discussed are Guaman Poma's illustrated sixteenth-century chronicles, D.F. Sarramiento's _Civilization and Barbarism_ (1845), and Anibal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" (2000).
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Castro-Klaren, Sara
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
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 3.6 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: Nurhussein, Nadia
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.060.506 - Internship-English
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Hickman, Jared W, Staff
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - 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:
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
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.060.100 - 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.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.060.107 - 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.060.108 - 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.060.113 - 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.060.113 - 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.060.113 - 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: 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.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: 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: 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.060.113 - 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.060.113 - 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: 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.060.113 - 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: 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.060.209 - 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.060.122 - 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: 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.060.209 - 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: 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.060.113 - 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.060.113 - 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.060.113 - 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.060.371 - 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.060.203 - 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.060.386 - 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.060.360 - 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.060.367 - 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.060.326 - 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.060.307 - 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: W 5:00PM - 6:50PM
Status: Closed - 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.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.060.505 - Internship - English
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Staff
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
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.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.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: Staff
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - 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.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.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 3.6 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: Closed - 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: Closed - 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.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.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.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 3.6 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: Closed - 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.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.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.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 - 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: Closed - AS.060.505 - Internship - English
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Mao, Douglas
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - 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: Closed