What makes modern poetry modern? In this course we will examine the remarkable development of American poetry in the course of the twentieth century (with perhaps a glimpse at the twenty-first), looking in particular at the technical, social, and political variety of writing. We will look at a number of schools and movements, including imagism, modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Mountain, the Beats, the Confessionals and the New York School. Poets in closer focus: Pound, H.D., Loy, Stevens, Crane, Hughes, Rukeyser, Olson, Ginsberg, Plath, and O’Hara. Assignments will include critical essays, creative responses, and presentations.

Selects works of British and American poets from 1900 to the present.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: General Literature and Language

Taught by Jeremy Green.

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The last decade has, it seems, been dominated by one kind of crisis and another—economic, social, cultural, and ecological. In these years we have seen neoliberalism fall into a crisis of legitimacy, the rise of social media, endless wars in the middle east, the destruction of democratic norms and rising disbelief in the political process, and, insistently, the evidence of climate catastrophe. How has American fiction spoken of these crises? How have contemporary writers enlisted different subgenres? How have they shaped and deformed narrative? Novelists we will address include: Jesmyn Ward, Blake Butler, B.R. Yeager, Jesse Ball, Ling Ma, and Kathryn Davis. Reading journal, essays, presentation.

Explores major literary and theoretical trends in the Anglo-American tradition after 1945.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Recommended: Prerequisites  and .
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

Taught by Jeremy Green.

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Surveys the major literary trends in prose and poetry from 1900 to the present in the Anglo-American tradition of modern, postmodern, and contemporary literature. Provides students with a grounding in the major authors and motifs of 20th- and 21st-century in literature in conjunction with political and cultural changes across the periods.

Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

Taught by Cheryl Higashida.

Only binge-worthy selection—rotten tomatoes rating of 98 or above—is on the reading list. Short stories by writers like Kafka, A.S. Byatt, Marquez, Gibson, or poems by poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Stevens, Frost, Auden, Muir. With no heavy tomes this class should be manageable during a busy semester. You will learn how poems and stories are put together and the related tools to decipher their meaning. For each poem or short story there will be a video lecture presentation available on Canvas plus in-class, in an actual classroom, further explication and discussion. The aim of this class is utter comprehension of the literary material so that when you respond to the material you respond not with dread but with pleasure.

Taught by Raza Ali Hasan.

Taught by Janice Ho.

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This course will begin with some central figures behind and within English language 20th-century poetry and then split up into interest groups according to the students’ own enthusiasms and desires to explore.  The central figures will include Whitman, Dickinson, Pater, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes.  The primary medium will be close and joyous attention to the poems themselves as well as the kinds of activities that can bring us imaginatively and intellectually into their presence.  As structuring devices, though, students should note that attendance is absolutely required and there will be some kind of writing for each class period.

Course taught by Dr. Martin Bickman.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: General Literature and Language

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This course considers how the legacy of slavery, including the Middle Passage, is rewritten in 20^th and 21^st century novels in English.  We will consider not only how that history is remembered, but how its legacy lives on.  We’ll begin with slave narratives to consider the narrative form and content: exile and natal alienation, social death, education and coming to consciousness, the journey to freedom, and yearning for Jubilee. We will also situate these novels within the broader contexts of racial justice, remembrance, reconciliation, reparations, regeneration, and human rights.

Novels may include Esi Edugyan Washington Black, Colson Whitehead Underground Railroad, Claude McKay Romance in Marseille, Dionne Brand In Another Place, Not Here, Rita Indiana Tentacle, Ana-Maurine Lara Erzulie’s Skirt, Edwidge Danticat Breath, Eyes, Memory, Marlon James The Book of Night Women.

Requirements: Take home mid-term and final exams, class leadership, and practical criticism exercises.      

Taught by Dr. Laura Winkiel.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. 
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

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T.S. Eliot wrote several of the most important poems of the twentieth century. He was also a major critic, a playwright, and a publisher. His work remains a troubling mix of brilliantly subversive “raids on the unconscious” and deeply conservative reactions against modernity. To read Eliot is to encounter other writers—major modernists whom he influenced and published (among them Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, and Djuna Barnes), writers he venerated and ransacked (“mature poets steal,” Eliot wrote), and other artists who informed his sensibility. It is also to encounter the modern world: the city, two world wars, mass culture, and the search for meaning.

In this class we will study Eliot’s major works and read those in his immediate circle and in his field of reference: our reading will open up Eliot’s imagination, and Eliot in turn will open up the culture of modernity.

Taught by Dr. Jeremy Green.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term. 
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

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A hybrid form, graphic narrative combines the innovative visual/verbal framework of the cartoon and the longer storytelling form of fiction and nonfiction. A term first coined in the US in 1978, graphic narratives have become a mainstay popular genre. This course will examine its popular appeal and also how this form allows for the grappling of difficult topics, whether it be the Holocaust, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, climate change, gay and queer topics, racism, and the Palestinian occupation.

Requirements: attendance, 2 essays and a final project.

Taught by Dr. Laura Winkiel.

Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

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Instructor: Elisabeth Sheffield

“There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

In this course, we will examine the emerging form of the science novel—that is, the serious literary novel that takes as its subject matter the complex relationships between scientific knowledge and the people who produce, use and are affected by it. Some examples of the science novel that we may read in this course include Susan Gaines’ Carbon Dreams, Ian McKewan’s Solar, Lily King’s Euphoria, Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf, Rebecca Goldstein’s Properties of Light and Allegra Goodman’s Intuition. We will consider the kinds of stories such novels tell about science and also how these representations might contribute to contemporary debates about and perceptions of science (e.g. climate change). But we will also think about these novels as work of art in themselves, and contemplate the aesthetic possibilities scientific concepts and discourse offer to fiction writers for creating new literary worlds. Students in this course will have the opportunity to write science stories of their own, potentially sharing them in a workshop format during the last weeks of the course.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. 
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

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Instructor: Prof. Janice Ho

This course focuses on one of the most central literary movements of the twentieth century: the emergence of modernism in Britain and Ireland, especially of “high modernism” during the period of 1910 to 1930. Novels written in this historically short, but aesthetically rich, period laid the ground for future novelistic innovations and represented a radical break from the traditional Victorian form of realism. We will focus on how these novelists reinvented the novel in an attempt to chart the myriad historical events occurring during this period—among them, the First World War, the enfranchisement of women, the beginnings of decolonization, the independence of Ireland, to name but a few of the most important. This course is interested in the inter-relations between the public and the private: that is to say, we will examine how public, historical events such as war and imperialism affected private notions of selfhood; but also how private experiences of subjectivity, domesticity, and sexuality critically engage with the larger socio-political issues of the time. We will be considering how modernist experiments in novelistic form were attempts to express and capture what seemed to be an unprecedented and unique modern world. Also, please note that since this is a class on the genre of the novel, the reading requirements are considerably heavy: you should expect to read up to 200 pages per week on some weeks. Some of the novels we may read include Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier"; E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India," James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Rebecca West's "The Return of the Soldier," Elizabeth Bowen's "The Last September," and Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse."

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: British Literature after 1660

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Surveys major literary trends from 1900-1945 in the Anglo-American tradition, including the characteristics of literary modernism. Covers both prose and poetry, as well as the relationship between literature and history to the close of World War II.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

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