CoursesSenior Seminars

This seminar explores the competing modes of political knowledge-making that emerged during the colonization of North America and the Caribbean. We’ll track the era’s major transformations—including settlement, slavery, and nation-building—and the violent rebellions they elicited. Focusing on three key modes of knowing (reasoning, observing, and imagining), we’ll consider how European ideas were adapted to New World circumstances. What literary strategies did elite writers use to represent the outbreaks of mutiny, heresy, Native warfare, and slave revolt they faced? And how did these depictions relate to enduring assumptions about politics and contemporaneous accounts of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions? We’ll read texts by William Strachey, John Winthrop, Aphra Behn, Tom Paine, and Leonora Sansay alongside works by Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke. And we’ll conclude with two retrospective attempts to know New World rebellion: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and a graphic novel about the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

For various cultural reasons, sexuality is a particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of the few cultural forms that is guaranteed to elicit a strong response. Our class will provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a cultural force involves defining key terms, such as “power,” to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example), on social justice. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.

By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest

 

By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources

 

By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive

 

By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

250 years after the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, this seminar aims to situate Phillis Wheatley within her eighteenth-century social and intellectual milieu, to consider the literary legacy of her poetry, and to understand the state of Wheatley scholarship. We will pursue these aims through careful readings of Wheatley’s poetry and correspondence, studying along the way the formal, aesthetic, and religious currents that shaped her work while also being attentive to ways in which she adopted and strained against those currents.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

 

Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 139 on Phillis Wheatley.

This class examines the influence and presence of popular U.S. and Mexican cultures on modern Chicana/o/x literature. Chicano cultures result from a mixture of different societies and cultures coming together – often as the result of military and economic aggression – to forge creative new identities of adaptation and resistance. We will read books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other writers in conjunction with selections from films, videos, musical performances, and visual arts to explore how Chicana/o/x culture transforms the cultural material in playful and critical cultural mestizaje. Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we explore.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

From border corridos to the Nuyorican Poets Café’s poetry slams, Latinx poetry has a long tradition of performance. In this class, we will consider how these traditions of performance manifest in Latinx poetry of the 21st century. Together, we will explore how contemporary Latinx poetry offers its own theories of embodiment, as well as how the body has been and remains central to the ways in which Latinx literature continues to reckon with history and disrupt national spaces. To do so, we will examine poems that reside at the intersection of the page and the stage. Among the poets we will consider are Elizabeth Acevedo, Aracelis Girmay, J. Michael Martinez, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Angel Dominguez. Each week, we will read a poetry collection and discuss its performance poetics to ask not what contemporary Latinx poetry is, or what it means, but rather to develop our own theory of what the poetry can do as a performance in and of itself.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This seminar explores the competing modes of political knowledge-making that emerged during the colonization of North America and the Caribbean. We’ll track the era’s major transformations—including settlement, slavery, and nation-building—and the violent rebellions they elicited. Focusing on three key modes of knowing (reasoning, observing, and imagining), we’ll consider how European ideas were adapted to New World circumstances. What literary strategies did elite writers use to represent the outbreaks of mutiny, heresy, Native warfare, and slave revolt they faced? And how did these depictions relate to enduring assumptions about politics and contemporaneous accounts of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions? We’ll read texts by William Strachey, John Winthrop, Aphra Behn, Tom Paine, and Leonora Sansay alongside works by Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke. And we’ll conclude with two retrospective attempts to know New World rebellion: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and a graphic novel about the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

For various cultural reasons, sexuality is a particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of the few cultural forms that is guaranteed to elicit a strong response. Our class will provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a cultural force involves defining key terms, such as “power,” to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example), on social justice. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.

By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest

 

By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources

 

By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive

 

By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

250 years after the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, this seminar aims to situate Phillis Wheatley within her eighteenth-century social and intellectual milieu, to consider the literary legacy of her poetry, and to understand the state of Wheatley scholarship. We will pursue these aims through careful readings of Wheatley’s poetry and correspondence, studying along the way the formal, aesthetic, and religious currents that shaped her work while also being attentive to ways in which she adopted and strained against those currents.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

 

Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 139 on Phillis Wheatley.

The unlikely story of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, has fascinated scholars and general readers alike—how could it be that not one or two but three authors whose works would live on after their untimely deaths could emerge from a single family in an isolated Yorkshire village? Indeed, the legend of the Brontës is always in danger of eclipsing the works themselves. In this capstone seminar, we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). We will consider these novels in their social, historical, and artistic contexts, examining each through a variety of critical lenses, and will discuss how the mystique of the Brontë family story and its r/Romantic backdrop has shaped our expectations as 21st-century readers of these novels.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors on the first enrollment pass.

This seminar investigates the extent to which premodern “literary” writers engaged and even transformed highly technical concepts of credit, need, excess, balance, doubt, risk, profit and loss central to the medieval legal discourse on usury. Texts including The Ballads of Robin Hood, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Gower’s Vox Clamantis and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale will be explored alongside technical discussions of usury by writers such as Gratian, Giles of Lessines, Peter of John Olivi, John Freiburg, and Nicholas Oresme. Questions for discussion and research would include: to what extent, if any, did our “literary” writers contribute to, or even intervene in, the legal discourse about usury? What role did technical notions of usury play in the crafting of literature?

 

Enrollment is restricted to senior English majors.

This class examines the influence and presence of popular U.S. and Mexican cultures on modern Chicana/o/x literature. Chicano cultures result from a mixture of different societies and cultures coming together – often as the result of military and economic aggression – to forge creative new identities of adaptation and resistance. We will read books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other writers in conjunction with selections from films, videos, musical performances, and visual arts to explore how Chicana/o/x culture transforms the cultural material in playful and critical cultural mestizaje. Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we explore.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

From border corridos to the Nuyorican Poets Café’s poetry slams, Latinx poetry has a long tradition of performance. In this class, we will consider how these traditions of performance manifest in Latinx poetry of the 21st century. Together, we will explore how contemporary Latinx poetry offers its own theories of embodiment, as well as how the body has been and remains central to the ways in which Latinx literature continues to reckon with history and disrupt national spaces. To do so, we will examine poems that reside at the intersection of the page and the stage. Among the poets we will consider are Elizabeth Acevedo, Aracelis Girmay, J. Michael Martinez, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Angel Dominguez. Each week, we will read a poetry collection and discuss its performance poetics to ask not what contemporary Latinx poetry is, or what it means, but rather to develop our own theory of what the poetry can do as a performance in and of itself.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.