English

This course focuses on the analysis and interpretation of various literary genres, exploring how language is used to enlighten, influence, and entertain readers. This class will involve reading, writing, and researching, as well as analyzing the course themes of identity, gender and class in a number of texts.

Introduces students to the discipline of English studies, with emphasis on close reading, major genres, and critical/theoretical approaches. Readings will be drawn from a range of literary periods and traditions.

A study designed to broaden a student's sense of the roots of the literary tradition of the U.S from its origins to the 1820s. Works include those of 16th century Spanish explorers, Native American tales, Puritan New England writers, and the literature of the American Revolution.

Between 1820 and 1865, American literature came of age with the period's extraordinary cultural and social upheavals. A study of the most important writers of the period, such as Poe, Emerson, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson.

A study of the regional voices and the literary movements of realism, including local color and naturalism, that marked the years following the American Civil War through the works of such writers as Davis, Jewett, Chopin, Gilman, Chesnutt, Howells, James, Twain, and Crane.

A study of the modernists writing from 1910 to 1945, along with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and of the 1930s Depression. Poets include Frost, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens, H.D., Moore, Hughes, and fiction writers such as Faulkner, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Hurston.

A study of representative prose and poetry of Old English and Middle English from Beowulf to Chaucer, including Old English heroic poems, elegies, gnomic verses and riddles, and works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

A study in the literary milieu in England from the early 1500s to 1600 with authors such as Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare, and Milton.

A comparative study of the historical, cultural, and literary movements underpinning the development and influences of the Neoclassical Age in England, focusing on such authors as Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Haywood, and Johnson.

A close examination of some of the major ideas and influences in British and continental Romanticism, with special emphasis on the development of Romantic literary theory through the works of such writers as Goethe, Hoffman, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.

A comparative examination of the historical and literary movements of the British Victorian period. The study covers a range of poetry and prose by authors such as Tennyson, Arnold, the Brownings, and Rossetti.

The course examines modernist poetry, fiction, and drama written in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland through the works of such writers as Hardy, Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, Synge, Auden, Shaw, Forster, as well as a more recent group that includes Greene, Murdock, Durrell, Stoppard, Larkin, O'Brien, and Beckett.

This seminar explores the biography, creative achievement, and lasting impact of a major author (or set of closely linked authors). Drawn from any national or cultural tradition, classes might include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, or William Faulkner.

A study primarily of Shakespeare's dramas through a careful analysis of the great tragedies, comedies, and histories.

An in-depth study of critical and theoretical approaches to literature, with an emphasis on the development of theories of literature from classicism to contemporary cognitive poetics.

This capstone seminar is designed for students to prepare and present publically, a significant and sophisticated written project in literary scholarship, technical writing, or creative writing.