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.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Gilman 219
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Hodson 211
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

What makes a poem queer? How can we tell? How has it changed over time? Understanding “queerness” to mean a non-normative array of lesbian, gay, trans and asexual ways of being, this undergraduate seminar will read across a long historical arc from the classical period to early modern poetry in order to think about how the lyric and the shorter narrative poem have transmitted queer feelings and recorded queer lives. Authors include Sappho, Virgil, Catullus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Beaumont, and Philips.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This undergraduate seminar looks at select works from the vast 19th and 20th century literature of tyrrany and subjugation, including by Melville, Greene, Garcia Marquez, Naipaul and Rushdie.

• Days/Times: T 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 377
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Bloomberg 274
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Bloomberg 274
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Bloomberg 274
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/8
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

From antiquity through our own day, writers have used their craft to try to imagine perfect, or at least vastly improved, human societies. Utopian literature spans broad forms: cloud cuckoo land visions of prosperity and abundance, detailed plans for the governments of the future, and ambiguous auguries combining utopia with its opposite: dystopia. Imagining better worlds is a heterogenous and ancient tradition, but beginning in the late 19th century, writers like H. G. Wells and Charlotte Perkins Gilman began to suspect that a perfect future was inseparable from a united one: ending hardship depended on bringing all people into a shared way of life and belief. But do utopian demands for consensus threaten the freedom to live as one chooses? Can utopia coexist with diversity? In this course, we will read from a broad range of prose utopias from the 19th century to the present, including Kang Youwei’s Datong Shu (1884), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1886), George Schuyler’s Black Empire (1938), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). Students in this course will develop a familiarity with a range of themes and conflicts that characterize utopian writing, and craft their own written reflections that consider the tensions between utopian visions of the future and the people those visions may exclude, marginalize, or assimilate.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Shallit, Jonah Forest Lubiw
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

In this course, we will read 19th- and 20th-century American and British literature about the sea, using an approach informed by recent scholarship in what has been called Blue Humanities or Oceanic Studies.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Feinsod, Harris
• Room: Gilman 219
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This course will survey what have long been thought to be the monuments of English literature from the earliest recorded texts to the end of the early Modern period, in a great variety of genres (from epic to lyric, fable to drama). Classes will provide the background necessary to read these texts both closely and historically, in the light of cultural continuities and differences.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

After a diagnostic introduction to his early poetry, this reading intensive seminar will concentrate upon Edmund Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), which we will read in its entirety.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

In this course, we'll explore relations between media via films about writers and fictions about film. Along the way, we'll visit with an array of troubled wordsmiths, glittering stars, obsessive fans, and unscrupulous executives; in at least two or three cases, we'll read a novel about cinema and then watch that novel's own cinematic adaptation. Texts may include films by Billy Wilder, Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Cord Jefferson as well as fictions by Elizabeth Bowen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Manuel Puig, Abdellah Taïa, and Sharlene Teo.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

All of Austen's completed novels, as well as a selection of her letters. We will examine both her influence on the novel form, and her work's relation with her social context. We will also consider why Austen has such unprecedented cultural authority today. Open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores the development of English law and the English legal tradition from the Norman Conquest through the English Revolution (ca. 1066-1688). We will begin by tracing the impact of the Norman Conquest of England and examine the origins and development of English legal and political institutions such as kingship, the common law, the evolution of legal procedure, and the court and jury system, ideas of franchise, treason and the emergence of Parliament. We will also consider how English law constructs legal categories including aliens, women, heirs, traitors as well as the legal framework for the emergence of the English Church under the Tudors. When applicable the implications of these institutions for developments in the contemporary American and British legal systems will be addressed.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lester, Anne E.
• Room: Hodson 313
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/25
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL, CES-LSO, CES-PD

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

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Spinner, Samuel Jacob
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/5
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/5
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course is grounded in the double conviction that translation is the most intimate form of reading and that literary translation is a form of literary writing. The goals of this course are to better understand the potential and challenge of translation as we learn to practice it ourselves. We will study what translators say about their craft and work closely with a wide range of translations. There will be two parts to each seminar: --discussion of assigned readings and analysis of published translations --workshopping of our translations. Students are free to translate from any language into English. Reading knowledge of a language other than English is required.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Jewiss, Virginia C
• Room: Mergenthaler 431
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English. For undergraduate students only.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Saiber, Arielle
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/30
• PosTag(s): MLL-PITAL

Stories entertain us, but we can also receive guidance from them, and we can tell them to impart guidance to others, to exercise influence, to make a point. This course will explore the ways that stories make their points in the genre sometimes called “fable,” in works by authors ranging from Aesop to George Saunders, from the 4th century to the present.  We’ll debate what fables actually are – Short morality tales about animals?  Portraits of exemplary figures that demonstrate how to live? - in part by reading many examples of the form and some theories of it, in part by writing fables of our own.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher; Choi, Susan
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): WRIT-FICT, WRIT-READ

An introduction to Shakespeare, in which every play we read we will also see performed. Close textual work and a focus on historical context will be accompanied by visits to local theatres, recordings of live performances, and Shakespeare films.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Stoll, Abraham D
• Room: Gilman 313
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in Updated description: the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied by Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Tempest; by Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder. As part of the course, we will try to organize at least one excursion to a Shakespeare or Ibsen performance in the Baltimore-D.C. area. This class counts towards the requirement of text-based courses for the minor in comparative thought and literature.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/19
• PosTag(s): CES-LSO, CES-ELECT, MSCH-HUM

Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/14
• PosTag(s): CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM