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Poets: Lyric & Narrative

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2019

This course is a general introduction to reading, discussing and writing about poetry, both lyric and narrative.  Our focus will be on the Romantics, experimentalists writing amidst a time of political upheaval and radical social change: William Blake, William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats and John Clare.  We will also read poets who influenced them (Shakespeare, Milton), poets they influenced (Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot) and a few poets writing right now (Monica Youn, Terrance Hayes).  At the...

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(Very) Contemporary American Fiction

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2018
  • Course Description: Thirty years ago David Foster Wallace described his generation as obsessed with “a social Now that admits neither passion about the future nor a curiosity about the past.”  This course reads some of the most vital work being done in American fiction to ask how we today experience, or want to experience, time. Why and whence this obsession with Now?  What kinds of temporal lags or leaps does fiction afford us? How are questions of identity knitted to our histories, present circumstances, and hopes for the future?...
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How to Do Literary Theory

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2018
This is a course in the lively history and practice of literary theory. Since literature came into the world people have had theories about it: what it is, what it can & shouldn’t do, why it exists, how it works, what makes a piece of writing good or mediocre or sublime—and who gets to say so.  We will read a wide range of answers to these questions written by very different people in very different places and times, from Ancient Greece to 1960’s Paris, from post-colonial Kenya to present-day New York and Beijing. To get a feel for how these different literary theories... Read more about How to Do Literary Theory

Nature Poetry

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2017

This course is a general introduction to reading, discussing and writing about poetry. Our theme this year will be Nature Poetry – that is, poems written about natural environments and humans’ precarious place within them. We begin with Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, and then turn to eighteenth-century satires by Pope & Swift, and work by the Romantics—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Barbauld, Keats, Shelley, Clare & Charlotte Smith. Other writers will include: Americans like Dickinson & Whitman; Modernists such as Eliot &...

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Kaleidoscopic Romanticism (Graduate Course)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2017

The kaleidoscope, said one commenter in 1817, the year of its invention, “presents to the view an endless variety of forms.” The same might be said of Romanticism, which has been reframing and reorganizing itself for the last two hundred years. This course uses Romantic-era texts to introduce critical and theoretical methodologies such as Romantic Theory, Formalism and Close Reading, New Historicism, Narrative Theory, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction and Queer Theory. Works include: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and...

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The Comic Enlightenment

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2014
course website

Against the eighteenth century's so-called progress of Reason ran a countercurrent that emphasized the irrational, the emotional, and the ridiculous. Beginning with Rabelais's Gargantua & Pantagruel and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the course will read comic works by authors such as Henry Fielding, Voltaire, Lawrence Sterne, John Cleland, Denis Diderot, Jane Austen & John Kennedy Toole. Each literary text will be paired with either a theory of Enlightenment or a film or TV show (such as Chaplin's City Lights, or Arrested Development). There will also be extensive...

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Narrative Poetry [Common Grounds: Poets]

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2014
course website

This course is a general introduction to reading poetry, with a focus on narrative poetry. We begin with Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, and then turn to eighteenth-century mock epics and verse narratives by Pope and Swift, and work by the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. The course will end with Byron's satiric masterstroke, Don Juan, and TS Eliot's toppled epic, The Waste Land.

The Romantics - graduate seminar

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2013
course website

Beginning with "pre-Romantic" work such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy, this course covers many of the Romantic age's big players: Wordsworth's Prelude; Coleridge's conversation poems and the Biographia; W&C's Lyrical Ballads; Byron's Don Juan; Shelley's Adonais, Cenci and Prometheus Unbound; Keats's Lamia volume, including the great odes; and the Romantic Scottish novel.

David Foster Wallace & Environs

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2013
course website

This course looks at the scene of contemporary American fiction via the work of someone whom many-perhaps controversially-have called the writer of his generation: David Foster Wallace. This year we will pay particular attention to influences on Wallace: Pynchon, Barth, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Ozick, Borges, Kafka.

The Comic Enlightenment

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2012
course website
Against the eighteenth century’s so-called progress of Reason ran a countercurrent that emphasized the irrational, the emotional, and the ridiculous. Beginning with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels & The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, the course will read comic works by authors such as Henry Fielding, Voltaire, Laurence Sterne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Goethe, and Jane Austen. Alongside these, we will also examine traditional Enlightenment texts by thinkers such as Francis Bacon & John Locke. The course ends with David Foster Wallace's story collection, Oblivion... Read more about The Comic Enlightenment

Late Romantic Poetry (Graduate Seminar)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2012
course website
This course reads two Second-Generation Romantics, Byron & Shelley. Other writers include Keats, Wordsworth & Coleridge, Friedrich Schlegel & Soren Kierkegaard, Stanley Cavell & Alain Badiou, and others.

David Foster Wallace & Environs

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2011
course website
This course looks at the scene of contemporary American fiction via the work of someone whom many--perhaps controversially--have called the writer of his generation: David Foster Wallace. Other writers may include John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Cynthia Ozick, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Aimee Bender, David Markson, Jhumpa Lahiri, or Junot Dîaz. Particular attention will be paid to Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Narrative Poetry

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2011
course website

This course is a general introduction to reading poetry, with a focus on narrative poetry. We begin with Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost, and then turn to eighteenth-century mock epics and verse narratives by Pope and Swift, and work by the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. The course will end with Byron’s satiric masterstroke, Don Juan, and TS Eliot’s toppled epic, The Waste Land.